Raging Bull Review: Thelma Shoonmaker’s Magnum Opus

Sequence during and after which Jake confronts Joey about Copa incident is an all time great, the post argument camera pan, Jake assuredly climbing stairs for bout vs paranoid delusions and frustration via Vickie: witness the spectacle. Jake then entering Joey’s home and confronting him is hysterical.

Simply put: Raging Bull is a tour de force from Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci.

Writers Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin allow you into the troubled mind of a hopeful boxer with a cruel punching method of wearing down his opponents with vicious hits, while he himself gets clobbered mercilessly. Raging Bull is not about the boxing matches, but about how long they went on and with what brutality this bloodsport contains, much like Jake LaMotta’s own life of bullying and violence. Raging Bull is all about Jake LaMotta’s fiercely combative personality that ruins his life rather than his cruel boxing style. Meanwhile, composer Pietro Mascagni delivers only beauty with his entrancing symphonic score that is romantic, epic, and sincere. Mascagni’s melodies soar above all the blood and bruises, adding an elegance to Scorsese’s Raging Bull.

Scorsese gives you the man’s home life flux and boxing career highlights with a visceral, dreamy directorial style all his own. No one directs like Scorsese and Raging Bull is some of his finest and sharpest filmmaking. His direction is impeccable with a stellar creativity in filming each boxing sequence like it is a magic show or something. Unique angles, panning shots, and long held close-ups ensures Raging Bull stays with you with a gorgeous black and white aesthetic that still shows all the sweat and blood. Michael Chapman’s cinematography has all these wonderful shots from the zoom out on Sugar Ray Chapman surrounded by smoke in an ethereal first person shot from Jake’s perspective to Vicki splashing her feet in a local pool to show her underage youth and playful personality.

Scorsese sympathizes with this lumbering brute and all his inner turmoil, constant doubt, increasing paranoia, endless jealousy, brutal violence, and cruel domestic abuse with a fair and balanced direction for Raging Bull. You see Jake LaMotta’s fearsome rage in every word, glare, and punch of Robert De Niro’s leading role. De Niro captures Jake LaMotta’s flurry of swift punishing punches, brutal manner, distrusting nature, disgusting sexism, commanding gravitas, cringe humor, and fearful paranoia all with ease. He is easy to hate and difficult to understand, but Scorsese lets you witness LaMotta’s boxing glory days to his embarrassing low moments in one of Scorsese’s greatest pictures: Raging Bull.

Thelma Schoonmaker’s first collaboration with Martin Scorsese starts with Raging Bull and her cuts are so sharp and entertaining. From Jake needing a punch in the face to Thelma cutting to him getting beaten in a boxing match and so forth with her effortlessly clever cuts to her steady pacing that make Raging Bull’s 129 minutes runtime, rush by like a knockout punch.

Raging Bull is a rush of blood to the head like one of Jake LaMotta’s legendary boxing bouts. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are at their absolute peaks in this timeless classic.

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