664
PARTISAN REVIEW
worst enemy.
Scorsese himself, in many interviews he gave, insisted that Jake La
Motta finds some sort of redemption at the end, much as Robert Ryan
does in
The Set-Up.
This is not how the movie feels . If La Motta's
cri de
coeur
in the jail cell is some kind of catharsis, the final dressing-room scene
feels almost posthumous, eerie in its lack of affect, with its mirror images
and references to earlier moments in the movie, other movies, other per–
formances, other lives. A good actor (De Niro) plays a bad actor (La
Motta) imitating a good actor (Brando) as he played a washed-up ex–
fighter (Terry Malloy) who talks like a bum but isn't one. La Motta is
preparing to put his own pain on the stage, including his break with his
brother, but he hasn't enough art or life in him to make us feel it as he
once could do in the ring. As he points at the face in the mirror and in–
tones words that once meant something to someone else, we know only
the downward curve from the dancing figure of the opening scene.
Scorsese and De Niro have put on display something raw, painful , and
unfocused in themselves, leaving us more disquieted than sympathetic.
Raging Bull
is meant to be a movie that gets under our skin, and it
does. [t resists the notion that lives proceed in an orderly way, that stories
lead to satisfYing endings, that problems can be solved, that people can be
much more than dumb victims of their senseless choices and wayward
moods. Its hero is blind, self-destructive, irrational, and only occasionally
impressive. We don't usually know why we're meant to care about him.
His suffering is nakedly intense without being especially illuminating or
redemptive, and this stymies what we need and expect from such painful
material. After Jake's ring career is over, we can easily feel we're wasting
our time, watching a master of self-degradation with some leftover life to
kill.
[n later films as different as
After HOllrs
and
CoodFellas,
Scorsese,
working loosely in color, regained his humor and buoyancy. He learned
again how to ease up, to balance conflicting points of view. Yet
Raging
Bull,
like La Motta himself - and like De Niro's creepy impersonation of
him - is finally too overwhelming to dismiss, too intricately conceived to
pick apart, too honest to deny, and too haunting to forget. Out of his
memories of certain Hollywood movies whose facile epiphanies he could
not accept, out of his intimate knowledge of people who made their own
days a living hell, Scorsese made a film that evokes Dostoevsky's treatment
of the lives of sprititual misfits and "self-tormentors."
