RAGING BULL Rerelease

Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian:

"In the autumn of 1980, Martin Scorsese arranged a preview on the Paramount lot of his latest film, a drama about prize fighter Jake LaMotta. Afterwards cinematographer Michael Chapman and Paul Schrader, one of two credited writers on the film, strolled out to the car park and mulled over what they had just seen. 'Wow,' said Chapman after a while. 'Marty really fucked that one up, didn't he?' Schrader drew a breath. 'Yeah,' he agreed. 'I don't know what went wrong there.'

"The following year, Raging Bull won two Oscars, having been nominated for eight. The American Film Institute recently voted it the fourth greatest US film of all time, just behind Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Casablanca. Robert De Niro's [sic] ferocious portrayal of LaMotta is widely considered to be a benchmark in the history of screen performances, not to mention a textbook lesson in how method actors will go that extra mile — or, in the case of De Niro, who prepared for scenes as the overweight LaMotta by embarking on a culinary tour of Italy, several thousand extra miles. And yet the initial reaction of Chapman and Schrader anticipated the mood among cinemagoers. Despite the esteem in which Raging Bull is now held, its initial release was hardly a cause for widespread celebration."

Actually, although Raging Bull didn't please every film reviewer in the U.S., it did receive widespread critical praise, going on to win best film honors from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Personally, I find Raging Bull one of the most overrated American movies of all time. It's both overlong and overwrought, while the much revered boxing scenes look thoroughly artificial. DeNiro's acting mostly consists of unintelligible grunts, and he never manages to imbue his brutish boxer with enough complexity to make him fully human.

Many commentators have been impressed by DeNiro's dedication to his craft — putting on a couple of tons to play the older LaMotta — but that same year I found, say, John Hurt's performance in The Elephant Man, even though you can't see his face, infinitely more effective. Despite all the heavy makeup, Hurt fully succeeds in conveying an actual person underneath his character's monstrous façade. Underneath DeNiro's LaMotta's flab, all I could see was more flab.

In ten or twenty years time — in case we still have a planet — Scorsese's The Departed will be considered one of the greatest movies of the early 21st century. Just wait and see. It's that banal. (And it's about men and their issues.)

Now, if you want a truly good movie about boxing and boxers, check out Robert Wise's The Set-Up, a harrowing (screenplay by Art Cohn), beautifully shot (by Milton Krasner) film noir starring a superb Robert Ryan and a remarkably good Audrey Totter.

Raging Bull will be rereleased in the UK on Aug. 17.