Raging Bull chronicles about twenty years in the life of its titular character, real life figure Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro). While most sports movies concern themselves with a rags-to-riches underdog tale, Raging Bull actually starts off with its main character already carrying some level of notoriety in his hometown and in the profession of boxing as a whole. The movie is far more concerned with examining LaMotta's life and the various struggles he dealt with and calamaties he caused rather than cramming his story into the strict storytelling requirements of conventional sports movies.
Through the movie, we get to see LaMotta's possessive attitude towards his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) that spirals into paranoia over her every move as well as his highs and lows in the sport of boxing and the way his career and marriage affect his relationship with his brother/manager Joey (Joe Pesci). If one is worried that Martin Scorsese and writers Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin will make this a reverent affair that covers up all of its lead characters flaws, no, this is a very "warts and all" presentation of Jake's life, which makes for fascinating cinema in that we get to see how Jake LaMotta keeps stumbling downward even long after he hits rock bottom.
Raging Bull, then, feels like a precursor to Scorsese's own Wolf Of Wall Street in that regard, in that both movies are about the debauchery broken men are capable of. But whereas Wolf Of Wall Street was a scathing indictment on a system that let Jordan Belfort get away with little to no consequences, Raging Bull is more of an examination of how LaMotta's violence-driven psyche that makes him such a determined legend in the ring makes him a nightmare of a person to be around. The only way LaMotta can imagine solving his problems is by way of resorting to his fists as a first measure, meaning both his wife and his brother end up on the wrong side of his hands.
That's an appropriate sense of tragedy in the way Scorsese films these darkest moments in Raging Bull, with every punch inside and outside of the boxing ring carrying a large amount of heft. This allows all of the various nasty acts in LaMotta's to have actual weight and consequence to them, making a jail scene towards the end of the movie where LaMotta breaks down in his solitary confinement cell hit hard. As this guy keeps punching the walls that contain him, he realizes just how futile resorting to violence in every dire situation has been for all his life. Robert De Niro excels in that scene, playing the emotional breakdown of LaMotta as tantamount to a massive tornado or a hurricane, something that barrels into your life and changes it forever.
De Niro, re-teaming with Scorsese for their third movie, has a similar level of success throughout the entire movie and he fares well even in the surprisingly undistracting old age makeup he's saddled with in the third act (which at times make De Niro look like Jon Favreau and other times makes him look like Alex Jones) while Joe Pesci is absolutely incredible as the main characters brother. I wish Cathy Moriarty got more to do in an underwritten role and the screenplay similarly falters in its final few scenes that wrap up loose ends in an overly tidy manner. Don't let those climactic missteps distract from how Raging Bull is a riveting movie that isn't afraid to get introspective about the violent flaws of a real life boxer.
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