Raging Bull

The rise and fall of prizefighter Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro).

Raging Bull is an experience. Director Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro paint an intricate portrait of professional boxer Jake LaMotta, a man whose entire life is consumed by violence and anger.

Inside the ring, LaMotte’s a beast, barreling over finesse fighters in a flurry of powerful, and often gruesome, blows on his way to the title. But LaMotta can’t turn it off. Outside the ring, his temper gradually destroys all of his relationships, and as he gets older and his body begins to fail him, LaMotta finds himself increasingly alone.

It’s a powerful story, light-years away from the heart-warming Rocky, and infinitely more satisfying. Scorsese eschews flash, instead employing a black and white, documentary style to heighten the film’s sense of realism, while trusting his viewers to connect the emotional dots that lesser films might have hammered home with dream sequences or the like.

In telling LaMotta’s story, Scorsese and De Niro are really telling a much larger, and timeless, story about men who lived by the sword and died by the sword, men whose solution to every problem was violence, men who failed, not because they lost a fight, but because they ultimately ran up against a problem that they couldn’t beat into submission. Men we glorify in their heyday and forget about in their twilight. Men like Jake LaMotta. And that’s why you don’t have to know who Jake LaMotta was—hell, you don’t even have to like boxing—to enjoy Raging Bull.