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PARTISAN REVIEW
sensuous music. Such scenes magically convey the sense of another realm,
a world elsewhere, where the hero escapes from the sordid details of daily
life - family, domesticity, love, friendship - the ordinary human things
Jake isn't very good at. Apart from such moments of glorious freedom,
Scorsese rubs our nose in Jake's human ineptitude.
In
the early scenes we
see him quarreling with his first wife, then clumsily courting the young
blonde Vickie - but resisting sex to keep his strength for the ring. We
take in the first flashes of insane jealousy that will drive away both his wife
and brother, and we see Jake's resistance to being managed by the local
mob - indeed, to anything that smacks of simply getting along. These
early moments foreshadow all the stations of La Motta's crucifixion. Even
when we first see him fight, Jake knocks out his opponent but loses on
points as the crowd riots; already we see Jake's way of losing even when
he wins.
What makes the movie so hard to bear is that we never break out of
Jake's point of view. Jake is opaque and boorish but we're locked in -
he's all we have. He gives and takes a mountain of abuse, and we cringe
each time he does some awful, stupid thing that will only make matters
worse. De Niro plays Jake as a stubborn, pigheaded man; he never listens
to reason, never simply tries
to
get by, but his obtuseness is also a kind of
integrity. Until his career collapses, Jake can always get away into the
ring, where the punishment he takes is refined into a style. Only the audi–
ence has no way out, not even into pathos: Scorsese and De Niro keep us
clinically detached from this painful but pitiless self-immolation.
When La Motta finally wins the title, success helps destroy him. His
demons take over: his jealousy poisons his love, his paranoia undermines
trust, his food binges take the place of sex. Soon all the little brutalities
take on an awful horror, especially in the brilliant scene in which he ac–
cuses his brother of sleeping with his wife, then goes berserk and beats
him up in front of his family. Jake is a literal-minded man: his brother
Joey said something that set him off, and nothing can stop him from
pushing his suspicion to the limit. But De Niro plays him in just this lit–
eral-minded way, simply
becoming
La Motta without giving us clues that
would enable us to place him, to absolve him by understanding him. His
La Motta has an irreducible core of craziness, especially about women,
that belongs to Scorsese's anthropology of Italian-American males, and De
Niro, in the ultimate post-Brando performance, all inarticulate gesture,
never softens or clarifies him for us.
The most literal feature of De Niro's performance, which appalled me
when I first saw the movie, was the way he had put on between fifty and
seventy pounds to play the later scenes. The bloated, unrecognizable La
Motta we see at the beginning and the end is also the bloated, unrecog-
