I’m one-half Italian-American myself, born into a family of second-generation immigrants who were, thankfully, nothing like Jake, Joey, Salvy and so on, but there’s certainly a good deal of iconography in my lost time that is made living image, or sound, in the film—crucifixes hung over beds, swing music wafting from distant radios, public pools, and so on. The meticulous and deeply felt re-creation of an all-but vanished world is one of the aspects of the film that grow ever more resonant over the years, at least for me.
And that’s why I think that Kael got it wrong when she supposed that she was supposed to be responding to “a powerful, ironic realism.” There is no irony here. Part of what’s so uncomfortable is the film’s absolute lack of distance, which could conceivably lead some viewers to give just a tiny bit of credence to Jake’s incredible paranoia about Vickie’s fidelity. Scorsese and star Robert DeNiro do not stand in judgement of Jake; they lay out who he is, and they chronicle his disintegration, not with empathy per se, but rather a tacit acknowledgement of affinity. It is not a coincidence, I think, that Scorsese took on Raging Bull after a period in which, as he put it, “I went through a lot of problems.” DeNiro had been trying to get Scorsese to consider the material since around the time of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and made an impassioned pitch to Scorsese while visiting the director in the hospital in the late summer of 1978. Scorsese says he was “fascinated” by the self-destructive side of LaMotta’s nature, but it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to understand that this fascination was hardly a detached one. One of the screenwriters who worked on Raging Bull was Paul Schrader, a man who was no stranger to self-destructive behavior himself, and it’s interesting to consider just how far he wanted to take things; in an interview, he recalled his version of the Dade County stockade sequence, which portrayed LaMotta trying to masturbate to recalled images of Vickie and failing to achieve an erection. Um, ouch.
All that being the case, one may still be stuck with the question famously mocked by Vladimir Nabokov: “What is the guy trying to say?” Robin Wood’s brilliant exegesis on the film as a study of homosexual panic, in his book Hollywood: From Vietnam To Reagan, represents a particularly dazzling answer to that poser. (David Thomson, sounding for all the world as if he’d hit upon the interpretation all by himself—and for all I know of his reading in film criticism, he well might have—reiterated this reading in a few years back.) And even so: so what, finally? One does not necessarily respond all that viscerally to a detailed examination of a psychosexual theme. I mean, some do, but I hope I won’t be taken as protesting too much when I say that’s not quite it for me. What, then? Of course the film’s imagery and sound cast an incredible, irreproducible spell…but I think what finally moves me so about the picture is something I can’t put into words, or perhaps am too afraid to put into words.
What the film represents from this particular temporal perspective is a little easier to pin down. In the interview book Scorsese on Scorsese, from which the above Scorsese quote is cited, the director says, “I put everything I knew and felt into that film and I thought it would be the end of my career. It was what I call a kamikaze way of making movies; pour everything in, then forget about it and go find another way of life.”
In his introduction to the second volume of Michael Powell’s autobiography, Scorsese recalls the greatest lesson he derived from mentor Powell: “He reassured that in me most of all: You believe in an idea, a concept, a story, a statement you want to make, and that’s the foundation of the film. You do not waver from it. Whether it takes you all the way down, whether it takes you to the edge, then pushes you off, even to the point of not making another film for thirty years, you do not waver. You’d better make that picture, even if you know it’s suicide.” DeNiro and Scorsese made Raging Bull as if their lives depended on it. Both the actor and director operate from very different places today, and whether we ought to begrudge them on that count is something we can perhaps discuss below. But the commitment you see in Raging Bull is still staggering.
“Raging Bull” has never quite done it for me. I do indeed admire the hell out of it (and if fact have taken the idea that overcooking steak “defeats its own purpose” as a mantra that I never tire of repeating), but I could never find a way into it that allowed me to feel personally or emotionally all that strongly about it. The reason for this is NOT because I don’t like the characters (although I don’t), but more that it’s simply “one of those things”. So I admire it, but don’t really like it.
Since I’m sure most of these comments will actually be about “Raging Bull”, I won’t to throw in a quick bit about whether or not we should begrudge De Niro or Scorsese the work they’re doing today. My take is: absolutely in no way should we begrudge them. For one thing, Scorsese is, I think, still doing terrific work, and while it may be, on occasion, a little on the austere side, or less immediate than his early work, so what? He is still a master who can add a bit of strangeness or nastiness or even creepiness to even his most commercial work. He’s not doing anything right now that he shouldn’t be proud of.
De Niro is a different story, obviously, but if he never makes another movie that I like or even want to see, I fail to see how that obliterates the work he did in the past. People talk about De Niro “tarnishing his legacy”, but I don’t buy into that. The important thing is that he HAS a legacy, and “Hide and Seek” can’t tarnish “Taxi Driver”, because it won’t SURVIVE “Taxi Driver”. Put in THAT DVD and quit bitching about “Righteous Kill”.
Also, and I suppose this could be considered overly pedantic, but Kael gets it literally wrong: at no point do Jake or Joey say “you dumb fuck,” to each other or to anyone else. Part and parcel of that classism, I suppose.
My grandparents grew up in the same neigborhood as LaMotta. My grandfather, who is 90, has referred to LaMotta as a “bum”. It impossible for me not to recognize something familiar in the smaller exchanges, particularly the part about how overcooking the steak “defeats its own purpose”.
So far as familiarity with a film’s milieu goes, the greatest compliment I ever heard someone pay to Scorsese came from a woman I used to date who’d been raised in the Bronx. I showed her Mean Streets, and she got exasperated: “This is like two more fucking hours out of my life with all the stupid dicks I grew up with. Who’d want to see that? You call this crap art?”
To be honest, it’s a stunning film that I just can’t get through. I think I could if it were about the people in LaMotta’s orbit rather than LaMotta himself, because I don’t find LaMotta all that interesting as a human being, or the exploration of self-destruction to be all that interesting. I know stupid people make stupid choices that hurt them badly; I’ve been seeing that in practice for quite a while.
Now, why anybody would stick around that guy? That I want to know.
None of which, of course, detracts from the great performances, or what for me is the supreme pleasure of the film, the editing. But I resigned myself to philistinism a long, long time ago.
Yeah, it’s still one of my all-time favorite films. Dan, the funny thing about self-destructing people – they are charismatic. Perhaps to a fault. They draw you in for many reasons – usually because you think that all they need is enough love. Generally, there is something visibly burning on the inside. Jake LaMotta was a star of his little circle because he was the one who made something of himself.
Great shot: Cathy Moriarty’s legs in the swimming pool. But the film is full of those. The camera speed stuff they were doing was just incredible.
@the first bill c: Yeah, not to turn this into more of a Kael-bashing session, but there’s quite a bit she got wrong, The “Cavelleria Rusticana” music does not, as she says, “swell” as Joey pulverizes Salvy, but in the transition to the meeting with Tommy, for instance. So much for the wisdom of the not-seeing-a-movie-twice rule, huh?
@Mike De Luca: My first seven years were in Fort Lee, at the time pretty much a suburb of the Bronx’s Arthur Avenue. Back when Cinema Village was a rep house, the funniest capsule description it ran was of “Bull”: “Watch Rober DeNiro defeat his own purpose…”
@tc: Ah, the Early Scorsese Gender Gap raises its head! Worthy, for sure, of its own separate blog post! I do, I must admit, wonder how many women from Rimini might have had the same reaction to “I Vitelloni”.…
It’s not so much the mileu, but a type of working-class ethnic male figure. It’s Tony Soprano. It’s Joe. It’s Jake LaMotta. It’s my grandfather. It’s most certainly a non-WASP thing.
Springsteen once talked about how born To Run was the ending of something. He said your first 20–30 songs are about you and everything you have to say.
Raging Bull is the end of something for Scorsese. (New York, New York should’ve been the end of something, but that movie got away from him.) There’s a reason why the book was entitled Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. If Cimino and Heaven’s Gate represented the self-indulgent, bloated side of personal filmmaking. Scorsese and Raging Bull represented all that is good and energizing about personal filmmaking.
I bring this up because I have very little patience for the whole Scorsese-hasn’t-made-a-movie-as-great-as-Raging-Bull-or-Taxi-Driver bullshite that always comes up during these kinds of discussions. The Aviator is just as personal a story as Raging Bull. And Scorsese’s work in the 1980s is as vital and worthy of scholarly consideration as Raging Bull or Taxi Driver or GoodFellas.
Buy Raging Bull on Blu-ray. It might be the best Americna movie you see all year. (Then again, Shutter Island comes out this year.)
There’s a part of me that doesn’t quite understand some of the guarded reactions “Raging Bull” gets when it’s brought up, considering I love it now as much as I did when I first saw it. Granted, it is a movie that I think forces people to face some of the most ugly characteristics of unrestrained, self-destructive masculinity. Characteristics that are buried deep down in most men although most of us wouldn’t want to admit it.
To throw a possible theory out there, I do think one’s upbringing may play a certain part in it. Certainly, if you grew up around people like this, you might appreciate more what the film is getting at (although some may resent that it is being shown). Scorsese gangster films which cover similar milieu like “Mean Streets” and “GoodFellas” allow you to stand outside and observe the behavior as a way of life not directly related to your daily existence.
“Raging Bull” doesn’t allow that comfort, which is why some people may find the characters unlikable and unrelatable. The movie is forcing you to live beside the wife beater who you know lives in your neighborhood, but hope you would never actually cross paths with. What the film I think also does is allow you to see the humanity beneath the brutishness without resorting to the pop psychology that would often be used to explain a character’s behavior in movies these days.
Also, it goes without saying that Scorsese’s camera angle and movements, sound, and editing add so much to this portrait of a man, going farther to capture the essence of Jake LaMotta than the usual restraints of a biopic would ever allow. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I always get drawn in when I watch it, often choking up during the last scene where DeNiro delivers the “On The Waterfront” monologue to himself in the mirror. Yes, I know LaMotta is a despicable human being to most, but he is still a human being.
In our current Slumdogocracy would a movie like “Raging Bull” have a chance at getting any kind of major recognition/distribution? I guess the boxing tag and the presence of an A‑list star ensures that it would, but I feel like if this movie came out in 2008 instead of 1980 it would’ve been a very bitter pill for America to swallow, championed by a passionate few, hated by more, ignored by most … not unlike, say, Synecdoche NY.
It’s funny, but technically I had no growing-up connection beyond congenital Catholicism to the characters in “Bull” – not ethnically, economically, geographically – but I found it enormously powerful from the beginning. Because I felt SCORSESE’S connection.
It’s an amazing movie, I think – one I first saw in a tiny revival house on Theatre Row, and have watched a number of times since.
The work with different camera speeds (as already said), the ring footage (“James Wong Howe, ‘Body and Soul,’ ” Scorsese immediately acknowledged), the sudden explosion of right-now talents like Moriarty (or the heralding of just-breaking talents like old friends Pesci and Frank Vincent, soon to hit new peaks in “GoodFellas” and “Casino”) — how can you not love these people? This film?
There’s a lot about Pauline Kael I adore, but I never understood that review. It reminds me of the knuckle-draggers who come out of a movie saying, “Eh, yeah, but you know, who cares – I didn’t LIKE any of the characters.” To which I usually, embarrassingly, say, “You LIKE King Lear? You actually want to go out for a drink with Oedipus?” That you understand them is more than enough.
It’s an amazing movie, and I think – with “Taxi Driver,” with “GoodFellas” – really stands as Scorsese’s best. And I think he thinks so, too. “If I’m not going to win an Oscar for ‘Raging Bull,’ he told me years ago, “I’m never going to win…Unless I’m like Carol Reed, who finally won for ‘Oliver!’ ”
I’m being lazy and quoting for memory, but that was the idea. And while I’m not willing to say “The Departed” marked the same decline from “Mean Streets” that dancing Dickensian urchins did from “The Third Man” – well, “Bull” as best picture still makes a hell of a lot more sense than “Ordinary People.”
Regarding Scorsese’s recent work: it’s good, but it seems even better when you compare it to the recent output of ANY other surviving New Hollywood director. The only one who comes remotely close is Spielberg, but Scorsese never made crap like “The Terminal.” Frankly, the conventional wisdom that Scorsese’s work drops off after “Goodfellas” never made any sense to me (it’s only true insofar as his worst film, “Casino,” was made during this period). I think “Bringing Out the Dead” is a particularly underrated gem, and I’ve liked everything he’s made in the aughts thus far; future generations of film scholars will analyze Marty’s collabs with DiCaprio as reverently as they’ve done for the De Niro films. Really looking forward to Shutter Island.
I always thought Raging Bull didn’t work because it wasn’t really about Jake LaMotta. Scorsese wasn’t interested in the main character. He was creating a self-portrait – and that self-portrait is evident in the uneven struggle of the filmmaking itself. Therefore, while Raging Bull may be a document of Scorsese’s expression, it’s really just an expression of filmmaking technique.
Steven’s comment: “Granted, it is a movie that I think forces people to face some of the most ugly characteristics of unrestrained, self-destructive masculinity. Characteristics that are buried deep down in most men although most of us wouldn’t want to admit it.”
Co-sign. So well put.
The first time I saw this movie it gave me a headache and I wanted to go home. The second time I realized it was a work of art. (And also quite grimly funny in parts.)
As I remember the initial mainstream reviews, they were very much focused on De Niro’s work, all the weight he gained etc. And if you focus on Jake you really may hate the movie, because he is one of the most deeply unpleasant characters in American cinema. It isn’t that he is pure evil, that would give you some distance. He’s every casually violent, none-too-bright prick you have encountered in your life, whether you were mugged by the guy or you’re related to him or you’re dealing with the damage he’s done to someone you love. Or, god help you, maybe you’re the one who loves him. Or maybe there’s some of him in you too, like the link people discuss between Jake and Scorsese. Doesn’t mean you have to be a puncher as well; Jake does such emotional violence to people.
I don’t think you have to have grown up around this Italian-American milieu to “get” it; Jake is hardly unique to that ethnicity, let me tell you. Growing up in the South you meet plenty of La Mottas. Only the accent is different.
I also agree with what Swhitty says about the film’s technique, and I think that was part of my initial “no” reaction. I appreciated the filmmaking, I saw the references, but I wasn’t comfortable with explicit violence being that beautiful. Second time around I realized I had missed the point. The lure of violence, of just exploding at will, is a huge part of the movie too. You have to see it, or you won’t see the humanity of Jake.
Apropos the current work of Scorsese and DeNiro, and whether they should be begrudged, I am reminded of something Joyce Carol Oates once said. To paraphrase: you’re as awesome as the best work you’ve ever done. DeNiro’s work in “Righteous Kill” might not be anywhere near his work in “Raging Bull”– heck, I don’t think it’s anywhere near his work in “Stanley and Iris”– but that doesn’t effect the fact that his performance in “Raging Bull” is amazing and thus he is an amazing actor.
By that same logic, however, because of “Casino” Sharon Stone is a great actress despite, um, everything else she’s ever been in.
And, I should note, it’s not surprising that Joyce Carol Oates would say something along those lines when a decent-sized chunk of her output, especially in the last two decades, is not quite on par with her best. (I just couldn’t get into “Come Meet Muffin”.)
Nice to see the respect paid to recent Scorsese; I expected a much harsher reception here. S.F. Hunger nailed it regarding future film buffs analyzing these films. They won’t have that DiCaprio baggage going in, or the idea that Marty was somehow obsessed with winning an Oscar and gaining the West Coast élite’s elusive acknowledgement. They will only see a director whose visuals are as kinetic as ever, with a restlessness and resistance to convention that prevents even prestige material like The Aviator from going down too smoothy.
In ways, Gangs of New York was like the cinephile’s Phantom Menace. There was no way it was going to live up to all the hype; “Marty’s dream project”, “25 years in the making”, etc., especially when the rumored tampering by Harvey Weinstein was made public–people were looking for any signs of forced compromise with a fine-tooth comb, and then wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater because they thought Marty had been in bed with the devil to make the film (when it’s unlikely anyone else would have let him make it at all).
And while DiCaprio may have seen miscast at the time, seeing his subsequent career-capping work with the same director makes his performance in their first collaboration seem less of a let down upon repeat viewings now, especially when one considers he needed to be a simmering straight man to the vulgar fireworks of Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s like blaming Pacino for being a bit limp in the first Godfather film opposite Brando’s iconic work, not to mention Caan’s.
The bottom line is that however overcooked the screenplay, and questions about a lost “director’s cut” aside, the film is teeming with life and detail rarely seen in period pics today, and filled with more superlative scenes and creative brio in their execution than most films I’ve seen this decade. If people now would see what IS there instead of regretting what isn’t, maybe it would get a fair shake years before it’s most likely to. A.O. Scott’s review was the only one which seemed to recognize that the film’s true value couldn’t be appreciated upon release, saying “I said earlier that ‘Gangs of New York’ is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance. ”
“Dan, the funny thing about self-destructing people – they are charismatic. Perhaps to a fault. ”
Some of them yes, some of them no, and in this case I fall in the latter. I didn’t find LaMotta particularly fascinating, or charismatic. I suppose I can see why others without context saw him that way, but to me he’s just another dumbass thug, and he gets a dumbass thug’s comeuppance; nothing about LaMotta’s story is terribly unique except in terms of scale and arguably the redemption at the end, which always struck me as odd and just reinforces my desire to know more about the characters in his orbit.
As far as recent Scorese, the reality is, people (including a lot of critics) generally think of him as a guy who makes awesome gangster/urban rot pictures and disregard everything else. I’ve met people claiming to be diehard fans who can quote “GoodFellas” line-by-line or have Travis Bickle all over their walls, but look at me like I’m nuts when I tell them he made “Kundun” or “New York, New York.” If he makes anything that ISN’T a gangster movie, the reaction on some level is usually “WTF is this? Where’s the gangsters?”
Does anyone else find the film, um, pretty darn funny? The previously cited line about the steak and the punchline after Jake’s fight with Janiro are the obvious examples. Someone once pointed out to me that Scorsese loves to mix horrific violence with laughs, a trait evident in even his earliest work like THE BIG SHAVE. Part of what draws me to self-destructive personalities is their inability to properly filter or check things–they often have a compulsive need to say or do something even though they realize it will probably interfere with their best interests–and how this tension frequently manifests itself as humor or a humorous situation (perhaps only to an outside observer).
Or maybe I’m just a sickie.
Nick, then I must be a sickie too, because there is a lot of pitch-black humor in the movie. One of the things I miss in Scorsese’s period work is that truly sick sense of humor that is so prevalent in the gangster movies, where you laugh even as you squirm.
Bits from “Raging Bull” that always make me laugh, although they probably shouldn’t:
Joey: Hey Salvy.
Salvy: What?
Joey(mouthing the words silently): Go fuck yourself.
Jake: WHO’S an animal? Your MOTHER’s an animal, you son-of-a-bitch…
Jake (performing comedy routine, to man passing stage): Hi, how you doin? (Bad stage whisper) Bald-headed fag.
Jake (to police detective): I introduce him…to men.
And so on…
As most of Scorsese’s best movies, there is a lot of funny stuff in it often at inappropriate times.
To add to Glenn’s list, I would include “Your mother sucks big fat fucking elephant dicks!”. Especially because that line comes during a particularly uncomfortable moment.
For a long time, I’ve felt that “Goodfellas” sort of plays like a comedy, and “Casino”, its brother, plays like a tragedy. I haven’t thought about it much past that, but really, almost every scene in “Goodfellas” is either played for a laugh, or has a laugh in it.
Jake’s whole comedy routine is funnier than it has any right to be (“You’d bring her home to dad…if he was a degenerate”), and I always bust a gut when he knocks the plates off the shelf and shouts, “Can’t you stack dishes right?!”
Lazarus, you are so right about Gangs of New York being the cinephile’s Phantom Menace. Difference is, history will be kind to the former and not-so-kind to the latter. Afterwards, I think people almost felt an obligation to be disappointed by The Aviator, and it was obviously easy to talk shit about The Departed given the Oscar smoke that was puffed up its ass. It’s odd that one of the two or three most revered American filmmakers of all time should also be one of the most underappreciated among currently working directors.
The line, “He ain’t pretty no more,” is horrifying and yet it gets a laugh out of me every time. It would take hours to figure out exactly which cinematic cues make that one amusing to me. Is it the delivery? Oh, and “They’re miserable because their mothers take it up their fucking ass.” Is it the playground echo there that gets me? I dunno. The movie cracks up Mr. C as well. Glad to know we have such distinguished, sick company.
And, of course, Pesci and Vincent started out as a comedy/music duo playing mob clubs in Jersey, doing songs and snappy patter.
What I wouldn’t give for a CD of THAT material.
I’m so glad to be reading all this love for “Gangs of New York”. I’ve loved that movie – with some mild reservations (Cillian Murphy would have be fantastic as Amsterdam; Diaz shouldn’t have been allowed within fifty yards of the set) – since day one. The hatred for it has always confused and frustrated me. The Draft Riots section is amazing.
I think The King of Comedy was Scorsese’s meanest film, on par with Robert Altman’s Nashville which it thematically resembles. Raging Bull took American masculinity to task, but The King of Comedy took to task the entire nation’s psyche.
If people have trouble appreciating Raging Bull because they can’t “relate” to any of the characters then that must explain why The King of Comedy almost never gets talked about – it’s way too misanthropic for them to handle.
Just as an FYI, I loved “Gangs,” too. My original review isn’t online but there are snippets of it, and my most blurby observation was: “Unsparing, hallucinatory, spectacular, it’s personal moviemaking on an epic scale, a vision that will take your breath away and hold it for the movie’s entire running time.” So there’s that.
As for Pesci’s logical leap as to why “they” are “miserable”: It is indeed horrifically hilarious, and back in the day was for me the source of much collegiate buddy humor, in the vein of “So, let me get this straight, just why are they miserable?”, etc. Another funny thing about the near-ceaseless profanity in the film is that no character ever breaches the slightest objection to it, save maybe in a perfunctory “not in front of the kids” fashion.
I was disappointed in “Gangs of New York”, although I can’t hate something that still has many brilliant scenes. I would agree with Bill that recasting DiCaprio and Diaz would have helped considerably. I also think the movie just feels like it is trying to do too many things in too short a time.
It’s probably the only Scorsese movie that I feel where the editing felt rushed and choppy. That said, I still prefer it over “The Aviator”, which I can’t connect to at all. I should also mention I’m in the minority who thinks “Kundun” was the strongest of his post-“Goodfellas” films. I feel that is a criminally under-appreciated film.
Also, glad Nick mentioned “King of Comedy”, which is a film that also quite never gets its due. The discomforting things it says about celebrity culture and its delusional followers back then is even more poignant today.
Rupert Pupkin’s routine on The Jerry Langford Show is hilarious becuase it is so mediocre. He’s exactly the kind comic made for television. He’s a laugh-track comic that doesn’t offend.
MR. Pupkin, meet Dane Cook.
Loved Kundun. Loved Casino. Loved King of Comedy.
Bringing out the dead, eh, not so much…
I grew up in the suburbs of north Dallas, and I could always relate to the characters of RAGING BULL just fine. If you’ve ever known a fuck-up, you can relate. I will admit it never had the effect on me that TAXI DRIVER had–there’s an angry magic in that film that the grinding, elegiac realism of RAGING BULL just doesn’t tolerate. But it is a movie that reveals new things with each viewing. And it’s almost perfectly made.
GANGS OF NEW YORK is probably still his most disappointing film to me. Well crafted with love, to be sure, but the narrative is unruly, the scope has Marfan syndrome, and even the aesthetics seem to get away from him at times (some of that music is inexcusable)–I find THE AVIATOR a much more complete experience…it feels less compromised, and indeed less choppy. (Its script, alas, is by far the weakest element…taking the tortured celebrity angle on Howard Hughes seems misplaced and dumb.)
Now, which would I rather watch again, GANGS or AVIATOR? Yeah, huh, probably GANGS.
I for one would love to see Scorsese work with Daniel Day Lewis again. That’s a match made in heaven.
John M. – Supposedly, Day-Lewis is going to be in Scorsese’s “Silence”, based on the Shusaku Endo novel. Another passion project for Scorsese that’s been simmering at this point for about as long as “Gangs” had been by the time that one got made. So we’ll see if it actually happens…
I always thought the movie was about the final title card of “being blind, but now I see.” It’s all a play inside Scorsese’s head, with Jake being Scorsese’s fear of what he’s becoming if he keeps wasting his life and his talent stuffing coke up his nose. Finally, when Scorsese almost died from it, he turned away from the abyss, and essentially the movie ended. Jake is the symbol of the abyss. That’s why the lack of sympathy for the characters (who I never saw as completely real) or the so-called no-ending ending never bothered me. It’s not really about the characters, it’s Scorsese’s head saying: I can’t do this anymore. Enough of that guy. I’ve seen the light and I’m going to walk out of this nightmare. I’m not going to pound my creative fists into hamburger against a jail cell anymore. And that’s just what he did. He must have, at that moment, had some amazing kind of clarity to have seen how to make this boxing story into a parable of his own troubles, and to have made it so unflinchingly. It’s not surprising he’s never made a movie this emotionally pulverizing since. Who the hell could?
Another RAGING BULL line that never fails to make me laugh: in the hit-me-in-the-face scene, when Jake tells Joey, “You trow [sic] a punch like you take it in the ass.”
Am I the only one who thinks DiCaprio is somewhat overrated in THE DEPARTED? He’s better than he is in GANGS, he’s believably intense throughout – but it seems to me like that’s all he is, the performance never varies from its single note of being seriously stressed out. (I much prefer his work in CATCH ME IF YOU CAN – I can’t imagine another actor in his age range doing a better job.) In comparison, Matt Damon reveals far more shadings and depths and emotional registers to his character.
And since no one’s mentioned it yet, I’ll put in a word for THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. Yeah, a lot of it seems lifted from Ophuls, Visconti, and Welles, but it’s so beautifully crafted, the period detail is wonderful, and I get the feeling he was more emotionally invested in the story than in almost anything else he’s done since RAGING BULL.
@Nelson
My dad argues, and I happen to agree with him, that “Age of Innocence” is such a perfect fit that it’s amazing Scorese didn’t do it earlier.
For my money, “Bringing Out the Dead” is underrated. It died for a very specific reason; people were expecting “Martin Scorese’s ER” and didn’t get it. But there’s a lot to love in that film.
Dan
Yeah, movie life doesn’t get much better than New York City, and a bug-eyed Nic Cage in non-hammy mode hitting the streets to Johnny Thunders singing “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory”. Major Tom and Cyrus, Janie Jones, the flashing red lights. Scorsese got exactly what he was going for, and I ate it up like candy. “Casino” is underrated, as well. DeNiro, meet Joe Bob Briggs. Crazy stuff. The Fleetwood Mac desert scene is a classic. And I don’t think DiCaprio is overrated in “The Departed”. When he beat the snot out of those two clowns from Providence, he more than earned his keep.
Dan – it IS a perfect fit, isn’t it? He really had a great feel for Wharton’s world. I once had the pleasure of meeting Gore Vidal, and he mentioned having written a screenplay about Justinian and Theodora that Scorsese was interested in directing at one point. Vidal much admired AGE OF INNOCENCE, and said it proved that Scorsese is along with everything else a great anthropologist – he’s interested in manners and social customs, whether of Italian American wiseguys or Gilded Age aristos.
Mike, we’ll agree to disagree on DiCaprio in DEPARTED, but I’ll co-sign on CASINO, esp. the desert scene. When I first saw the film I was disappointed – it struck me at the time as a retread of GOODFELLAS material – but of course I see now that he was after something very different.
I love Bringing Out The Dead, those flashing red lights are permanently burned into my brain, as indelible an image of New York as those in Taxi Driver. And Scorsese’s best use of a rock soundtrack ever, or at least ever since Mean Streets. But I can’t get on board with the Casino defenders. Still think that’s Scorsese’s worst. Even the relatively cold, impersonal The Departed is more alive than the curiously inert Casino. I think a good deal of that has to do with DeNiro’s completely bland, uninteresting, artless performance (it’s the moment where he started going downhill). You know your movie’s in trouble when DeNiro and Pesci are both upstaged by James Woods.
I didn’t care for “Casino” at first, but I find it growing on me, and whenever it’s on television I’ll start watching.
Definitely a high point – perhaps the last one – for Woods, and the best thing Stone ever did.
And although it’s not my favorite mob movie of Scorsese’s, I do think it’s a wonderful – and not very well disguised – attack on the corporatization of Hollywood.
Or is it just a coincidence that De Niro’s character ends up looking exactly like Lew Wasserman?
Casino is epic and tragic, anchored by a fine subtle performance on the part of DeNiro, a great performance (!) from Sharon Stone, and the scenery-chewing of Woods, Pesci, et al. While Goodfellas took us inside the reality and the glamour both of mob life, Casino shows us how the mob _works_ – the nitty-gritty details of casino operation.
And like a lot of great Scorsese protagonists, the mobsters of Casino are brought down by their own character flaws– their inability to controls themselves and others.
It’s also a poisonous and rapturous portrait of love– no wonder, then, that the theme from Contempt is continually washing over us.
Also, like Raging Bull: really really funny in parts. I still laugh when Pesci says “Back home, years ago…” and one of those place-locator titles reads “BACK HOME, YEARS AGO”.
It, like Age of Innocence and Kundun, is a freakin’ masterpiece. And– here I realize I’m being a wee bit blasphemous– a far greater gangster film than Goodfellas.
The Aviator is a good movie. The reason a lot of Scorsese fans don’t like it is because it’s not really a “Scorsese film.” But that’s why I think it’s good. For me, Scorsese’s problem as a filmmaker has always been that he keeps stepping on his own toes – his movies always have to be about himself. He’s always imposing shots and editing schemes on the movies that have nothing to really do with the storytelling; it’s as if he has to keep reminding the audience that he’s there: Look at his fast dolly, look at this montage, look at this zoom added onto a dolly, etc.
But The Aviator is, along with maybe The King of Comedy, the one time where he didn’t ruthlessly impose himself upon the material. He did what a storyteller is supposed to do: Tell the story. And I think that’s why a lot of fans look at it as an impersonal work. To me, however, that’s what makes it strong.
@Tom, I was totally with you until I got to the “greater than Goodfellas” clincher. 🙂 Casino is a fine, fine film though.
I think “Casino” is great, and I absolutely don’t think it’s when De Niro started going down. In fact, I think that’s his last truly great performance. He’s so natural and at ease, even in torment. He’s marvelous in the scene where Rothstein says that love can grow over time.
And yeah, it’s funny. Pescie and Vincent, covering their mouths to thwart FBI lip-readers, and an old guy comes walking by: “Who’s this guy, who’s this guy…”
Re: DiCaprio in The Departed, he may not have has as interesting or layered a role/performance as Damon, but I haven’t seen someone play frayed nerves and panic as well in recent memory as D‑Cap did here. It really is uncomfortable to watch him squirm as the walls are closing in. That scene in the car with Sheen and Wahlberg, the one in the airport…the jumpiness never feels anything less than organic to me.
Also, count me in as big a fan of Kundun and The Age of Innocence. I’m really looking forward to seeing Marty get this Silence project to production, and hopefully it will have a better fate commercially and critically than those two. Not only is Daniel Day-Lewis slated to work on it, but Benicio del Toro as well. That’s going to be fun to watch.
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Thanks!
I agree that of his latter-day films (post-Goodfellas), his greatest are Age of Innocence, Bringing Out the Dead and Casino.
@Tom,
I second your assertion that Casino is superior to Goodfellas… sort of like Goodfellas was a dry run for the much more stylized and aesthetically formal Casino.
Glenn:
Long time Fort Lee resident here; if you don’t mind me asking, what part of town did you live in? I’d imagine it’s probably unrecognizable from your childhood. It’s practically unrecognizable from my childhood, and I was born in ’88.
If Fort Lee was a suburb of the Bronx when you lived here, it’s really just a suburb of Manhattan now. Though, in terms of wannabe Manhattan’s, it doesn’t have anything on West New York.
@Ryan:
From the ages of zero to about five, I lived on Hudson Street, right off the bridge. If you go to the Food Emporium and stand at the bagging section of checkout aisle 8, that’ pretty much the terrace of my grandparents’ house. I was born in ’59, well past the heyday of, say, Bill Miller’s Riviera on the Palisades, but my dad parked cars at Hing’s Chinese Restaurant in nearby Englewood, a hot spot for celebs in the tri-state area (Paul Anka was a regular). I don’t know that I’ve ever had better Chicken Chow Mein than what that place served up. Fort Lee was a fabulous Italian enclave; the yearly feast of St. Rocco pretty much took over the town. There was a wonderful large movie theater on the main drag, where I remember seeing ‘Mary Poppins’ for the first time. In subsequent years Korean and Japanese investment turned it into an almost entirely Asian burg. Haven’t been back in a few years; I ought to go visit my grandparents’ graves in St. Mary’s—the last Italian enclave left!—when the weather gets a little better. Legend has it, by the way, that the vicinity around Hudson St. was where NYC mobsters would dump the bodies of the guys they’d offed, so the corpses would be in the jurisdiction of the Jersey police and thus throw a little of the scent off their trails.
Ahh, good ol’ Aisle 8. Though it’s an A & P now, not a Food Emporium (that’s about two blocks away from where I currently reside). Good to know I buy my food on a little piece of your childhood.
Yeah, it’s mostly little Asia now. The bad running joke around here is that they were drawn to the surnames Fort LEE and Palisades PARK and Cliffside PARK. There are seriously three pages of “Kim“ ‘s in all of my yearbooks.
And as a fun fact, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the term “Cliffhanger” comes from your and my home town. Biograph, Goldwyn, Metro, Fox are just some of the big production names that started in Fort Lee, and Micheaux, Griffith, and Melies, and Mary Pickford got are just some examples of those who got there start around here. Only recently has Fort Lee started embracing the fact that it was the first ever movie capital of the world, they even renamed a road off Main Street “Theda Bara Way”, and have pictures of the town from the silent era plastered in certain parts. It’s a nice little piece of folk-lore.
Perhaps the town’s rich history in film is where you and I got ‘the bug’ from, Mr. Kenny?
Being one of Martin Scorsese’s big fans, it’s with great joy I see “Raging Bull” getting all the recognition it currently has. What I find so intriguing is that from his 80s output, so many people forget the fantastically underrated King of Comedy, After Hours and The Last Temptation of Christ (I’m sidestepping Color of Money). If something, those films always showed what a great director Scorsese is, no matter what kind of means he has available. And though from his latest output I found Gangs of New York underwhelming, his films always breathe a cinematic genius that a lot of so called filmmakers these days can only aspire to. “Raging Bull” continues to be a testimony of his talent, and of all the people who worked in it, namely the great cinematographer that is Michael Chapman and the editing of Thelma Schoonmaker.