Raging Bull (Film Review)

1980 United Artists
Directed by: Martin Scorsese; Written by: Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin
Starring: Robert De Niro 
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 129 Minutes 
The Nicsperiment Score: 9/10

I feel like I've fought with Raging Bull every time I've viewed it. It was released the year before I was born, and the critical praise I heard for it growing up bordered on hyperbole. Then all my film textbooks in college made frequent references to it...yes, it was...the textbook film.
Yet, when I finally watched Raging Bull, something just didn't click. Here is real-life boxer, Jake LaMotta, as presented by director Martin Scorsese, written by Paul Schrader, and portayed by Robert De Niro, as one of the most toxic central characters in all of cinema. For two hours, we're shown how LaMotta squanders both his considerable boxing talents and promising personal life because he thinks that anyone who even looks in the direction of his wife, Vickie, is sleeping with her.
Of course, LaMotta also frequently beats Vickie, takes out all of his anger and disappointment on her, and the deepest conversation they are shown to have begins and ends with "Do you want a glass of water?"
Raging Bull is beautifully shot in black-and-white, with one brief sequence of color involving a home-movie passage-of-time montage. Scorsese directs this film, cinematographer Michael Chapman captures it, and Thelma Schoonmaker edits it as if it is the only film that will ever be made. It is technically perfect. But why is it about this guy?
On my first Raging Bull viewings, I wondered why Scorsese didn't explore any of LaMotta's backstory. After all, the real life LaMotta was forced by his father to fight local kids for the neighborhood's amusement. That's how the LaMotta family paid its rent. Surely, being forced to live that way would give anyone a complex.
Nope. We don't even get a reference to Jake's father in this film. Jake's brother, Joey, played by Joe Pesci, is no saint, but definitely looking out for his Jake's best interest. Joey never brings him up their father, either. Jake and Joey's relationship is the backbone of the film, and at least seems to keep Jake out of the worst trouble, until Jake starts to think Joey might be fooling around with Vickie.
The acting in Raging Bull is just as masterclass as the filmmaking. De Niro, Pesci, and Cathy Moriarty, in her first role, as Vickie, all seem possessed by their characters. When LaMotta is in the ring, I feel like I'm getting hit, and the flashbulbs are going off in my face. Again, from every technical and performative standpoint, it just doesn't get any better than this. And yet...
What is this film trying to say? I've been wondering that for decades, and few if any discussions I've seen surrounding Raging Bull broach that topic. I've noted my review philosophy before, and I'll mention something from it here again: I do not want a piece of art to tell me how to feel. It's up to me, the viewer, to both have, and decipher my own reaction. However, I'd at least like the art to present a perspective for me to wrestle with. For the life of me, I can't pinpoint what Raging Bull's perspective is. Scorsese's personal addition of Biblical verse to the film, just as the end credits begin to roll, only muddies the water more:

So, for the second time, [the Pharisees]
summoned the man who had been blind and said:
"Speak the truth before God.
We know this fellow is a sinner."
"Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,"
the man replied.
"All I know is this:
once I was blind and now I can see."
John IX. 24-26

But what context does this have in Raging Bull? Late in the film, a clearly humiliated LaMotta doesn't seem to have learned anything at all. He's lost his family and career, and has just finished punching a prison wall, weeping about how unfair his life is. How does he see anything differently now? His last words in the movie, as he shadowboxes in front of a mirror, are "I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss." Sounds like the same asshole!
I'm not alone in feeling like this scripture is anachronistic with the character as presented. Raging Bull's own screenwriter, Schrader, "I had no idea it was going to be there, and when I saw it, I was absolutely baffled. I don't think it's true of La Motta either in real life or in the movie; I think he's the same dumb lug at the end as at the beginning, and I think Marty is just imposing salvation on his subject by fiat. I've never really got from him a terribly credible reason for why he did it; he just seemed to feel that it was right."(1) The verse does happen to appear before a memorial to Scorsese's recently deceased NYU professor, which both decodes the film for me in a way, and reveals why I have such a hard time connecting to it: Raging Bull is an intensely personal exorcism of Martin Scorsese's own unique and private emotions.
Scorsese, who directed Raging Bull shortly after nearly dying from a drug overdose, simply provides a clear-cut slice of Jake LaMotta's very troubled life in a fashion that neither praises nor condemns LaMotta--it's a show don't tell of the most extreme. Any actual meaning found in Raging Bull is intensely personal to Scorsese, and at the service of expressing this meaning, Scorsese has exercised his craft to the highest order.
That's fine, but it's not a personal vision I can connect with, at least not in the first nearly 40 years of my life. Subsequently, as many "Greatest Movies Ever" lists as Raging Bull has appeared upon--I suspect simply due to its technical virtuosity, as I've heard little argument for any deeper philosophical merit--it's likely to never appear on any of mine.

(1) Schrader on Schrader, p. 133