As expressed in the film’s justly famous credit sequence-in which a distant LaMotta bounces and shadowboxes in elegant slow motion on the left side of the 1.85:1 frame, accompanied by the effusive flourish of Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” -he is eternally, like all of us, a small man in the corner. You could use the term larger than life, but life seems to swallow him up. The difference is that Jake LaMotta is no made-up character-in fictionalizing a real man, Scorsese at once elevates him and brings him down to earth. It’s an immense tale of one possibly very silly man’s downfall-he’s the Charles Foster Kane of bruisers, the Italian-American Terry Malloy, the Scarlett O’Hara of big, dumb lugs.
It was sports, which took me out of the picture.” With his immersive approach to scenes of physical and emotional violence, in the ring and in the home, Scorsese ensures that the viewer will never be taken out. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. It was always one angle on TV or in the movie theaters.
Scorsese himself has said he had little use for boxing pictures: “I didn’t know anything about boxing. Despite all these forces striving for intimacy, Scorsese’s vision nevertheless explodes into a behemoth of a film, the ultimate boxing movie, which ironically has little interest in the sport of boxing.
And the film achieves this majesty despite what feels like constant resistance-from Paul Schrader’s grounded screenplay from the richly pitiful performances by Robert De Niro as LaMotta, Joe Pesci as his put-upon brother, Joey, and Cathy Moriarty as his wife, Vickie from the grainy, gritty Life-magazine aesthetic of cinematographer Michael Chapman. It’s a sports picture blown up into tragic opera, a film about a small-and often, as depicted, small- minded-person who somehow attains mythic grandeur. Of all those agreed-upon Great American Movies, Martin Scorsese’s sort-of-biopic about fighter Jake LaMotta is surely among the most conceptually strange and discomfiting to experience.
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