by Shawn Levy
He’d always been skinny, but not because he was a picky eater: he was just cut out that way, lucky bastard. But now he was going to have to make work out of eating, and eating specifically to gain weight fast. “At first it was fun,” he admitted. “I ate ice cream and everything I wanted—it’s like part of the fantasy that one has about eating everything. I took a tour through France, from Paris to the Riviera, stayed in inns and ate. And for two weeks I was miserable, because as good as the food was, it’s rich—you could eat only one big meal a day and then lie there, digesting it.” But before long he had to go beyond the limits of comfort and force himself to eat: “After 15, 20 pounds, it was hard work. I had to get up early to eat a full breakfast and digest that in order to eat a full lunch and digest that in order to eat a full dinner. And lots of Di-Gel or Tums.”
Aside from the unpleasantness of feeling constantly overstuffed, there were aspects to his new size that he hadn’t anticipated: “I began to realize what a fat man goes through,” he said. “You get rashes on your legs. Your legs scrape together. You feel your weight on your heels when you stand up. It was like going to a foreign land.” But, he said, the results could not have been achieved any other way: “The internal changes, how you feel and how it makes you behave—for me to play the character, it was the best thing I could have done. Just by having the weight on, it really made me feel a certain way and behave a certain way.” (Ironically, as De Niro was bulking up to play the gone-to-pot Jake, Pesci, who would appear in a later-life reconciliation scene between the brothers, had to thin out a bit to play the older Joey. They shared a meal at Pesci’s old stomping grounds, Amici’s, during the production hiatus, and while De Niro gorged, Pesci skimped.)
Production resumed for one day in the autumn so that they could get some intermediate shots of De Niro’s weight gain; then he went back to overeating until December, finally topping the 215-pound mark that he’d been aiming for. Scorsese had planned to shoot the later sequences in Los Angeles, doubling for Florida, and he quickly learned that he was no longer dealing with the same sort of actor he had had in front of the camera earlier in the year when they created the boxing sequences there. “Bobby’s weight was so extreme that his breathing was like mine when I’m having an asthma attack,” Scorsese said. “With the bulk he put on he wasn’t doing forty takes, it was three or four takes. The body dictated. He just became that person.”
The film wrapped just as the year ended. Scorsese took a break to energize for the six to eight months of editing, sound work, and scoring he would undertake for the film, and De Niro set about regaining his usual form—a daunting process. On a visit to Long Island, he put his son, Raphael, on a bathroom scale. “He was 30 pounds,” De Niro said, “and I remember thinking that I had to lose two of him.” He learned that he couldn’t lose the weight as quickly as he put it on. “I couldn’t go back to eating the way I normally did,” he said, “because I would then feel sick. I had to let myself down gradually.” When he showed up at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards at Sardi’s that winter, he conspicuously ate but a small cube of steak for dinner; we know because the press were dutifully recording his diet, partly a testament to how much his personal commitment to the role captivated the world. For years, in fact, movie audiences would scrutinize each new photograph and film appearance to see if he had lost his Raging Bull fat, and it took him a decade and another severe physical transformation, this time for Cape Fear, to show the world that he’d done the trick fully.
AS HARD AS De Niro had worked in making the film happen and in becoming—there really was no other word for it—Jake LaMotta, Scorsese would replicate his commitment and endurance in assembling the footage they’d shot into a film. Much of the editing was done by Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker—who had worked with him on his student film Who’s That Knocking at My Door? and who would cut every one of his feature films after Raging Bull—in all-nighters in a cramped, makeshift editing room in Scorsese’s apartment. They came up with certain aspects of the finished film’s structure there, such as the slow-motion shots of De Niro dancing in the ring in a leopard-skin robe that ran over the title sequence and the concept of beginning the film with the older, fat LaMotta preparing to recite from, among other things, Budd Schulberg’s script of On the Waterfront as part of a cabaret show (“De Niro playing Jake LaMotta playing Marlon Brando playing Terry Malloy,” Scorsese noted)—revealing the end, or really the aftermath, of the story right at the outset.
United Artists executives had felt that surprising the audience with De Niro’s weight gain would have more impact if it happened later in the film. But publicity about it had begun to leak out even while they were still shooting, and when the studio bosses finally got to see the film, in an unpolished but basically finished cut in July 1980, they saw the genius in the choice that Scorsese and Schoonmaker had made. “Scorsese,” Steven Bach admitted, “had been right. He had feared that publicity about De Niro’s weight gain would be too widespread and that audiences would sit through the film not seeing, not hearing, waiting only to see ‘the fat man.’ He undercut that voyeuristic fascination at the start, replacing it with curiosity not about an actor’s stunt but about a man’s life.”*5
That first screening of the finished film would become legendary for the reaction of Andy Albeck, the Russian-born (of Danish stock) film distributor who had made a personal fortune in the movie business in Asia before spending thirty years climbing the corporate hierarchy at United Artists, where he reigned as president at the time Raging Bull was made. He was a neat and punctilious fellow, a vigorous athlete, a stickler for protocol. If young, hip executives such as Bach and David Field had a hard time swallowing Raging Bull, even in a version tempered from Schrader’s vision, they feared that Albeck would have a visceral reaction against it. When the film ended, Bach recalled, “the lights came up slowly in a room full of silence, as if the viewers had lost all power of speech.” Bach saw Scorsese in the back of the room, cringing against a wall. “Then Andy Albeck rose from his seat, marched briskly to him, shook his hand just once, and said quietly, ‘Mr. Scorsese, you are an Artist.’ ”
Indeed he was, but an exceedingly temperamental one, and ever more so as the long process of finishing the film dragged on. As the film’s November debut approached, Scorsese was working day and night, literally, and becoming lost in the details of production. Near the very end, he threatened to remove his name from the film entirely because he didn’t feel that the drink order of a background actor (played by the director’s father, in fact) was audible enough. Irwin Winkler, who was deprived of the opportunity to throw a proper premiere for the film because Scorsese was taking so long to polish it, had had enough. “I said, ‘People are going to look at this picture one hundred years from now and say that it’s a great, great movie,’ ” he remembered. “Because you can’t hear ‘Cutty Sark,’ which, by the way, everybody else says they can hear, you’re taking your name off?’ And he says, ‘Yes, I’m taking my name off the picture.’ I said, ‘Okay, if you want to take your name off the picture, it’s off, but meanwhile, the picture’s going in to the lab.’ And that was it. Obviously, he was a little emotional at the time.”
In time, Scorsese would level out, and he would always feel that what he and De Niro had achieved in Raging Bull went beyond anything they’d ever done or ever seen in a film. “Look,” he said soon after the release, “there’s no way to do it unless you do it right. What other people might call ‘honest,’ we call ‘right.’ And that degree of honesty is highly painful. We had a similar idea in mind on Raging Bull, but I cannot verbalize that idea. The point is I’m standing there naked in this film, and that’s all there is to it.”
Raging Bull premiered on a single screen in New York, and the critical and public responses were an almost unanimous acknowledgment of the genius of it accompanied by widespread repulsion at the pith of it. (Among the viewers startled by the brutal tenor of the film was Jake LaMotta himself. After seeing Raging Bull fo
r the first time, he said to his ex-wife Vicki, who was also at the premiere, “That wasn’t me. I wasn’t like that.” “No,” she replied. “You were worse.”)
TIME HAS LED us to believe that the foremost acting achievement in Raging Bull is the fact that its leading man put on fifty or so pounds to play the final portion of the film. But to be fair, putting on weight, even in a binge, isn’t as hard as what De Niro did with his body before filming began, namely, building the scrawny frame of Travis Bickle and Monroe Stahr into a body indistinguishable from that of a professional fighter fifteen years younger than himself. In his Everlast shorts and old-timey gloves, the muscles in his belly, arms, and legs as hard and sleek as marble, De Niro is every bit the picture of the prizefighter: lithe, chiseled, not a cup of fat on his body, a thoroughly credible fighting machine.
When he moves in the ring—and Scorsese films the action in slow and fast motion almost as often as at regular speed—De Niro doesn’t only move like a fighter (and, specifically, like Jake LaMotta) but acts like a fighter: focusing like a laser on his opponent, trying to strategize while engaged in combat, absorbing and meting out punishment with a genuine sense of pleasure, relishing the challenge of the bout, playing broadly to the crowd, too adrenalized and battered and in the moment to absorb the things his cornermen are telling him. Not a decade before, De Niro played a baseball player of limited gifts and could barely pass as a simulacrum of the real thing; in Raging Bull, he is one of the most plausible movie-screen boxers ever filmed.
And yet, as ugly as things get in the ring—busted noses, eyes spinning after blows to the head, blood filling water pails and dripping from the ropes—it is outside of it that LaMotta and his story are at their most feral, ugly, and horrifying. Even when he tries to understand himself, LaMotta cannot separate one type of violence, one type of threat, one type of fight from another (not for nothing, by the way, does the film open with him staring at himself in a mirror, the first of several such moments). In the first non-fighting sequence set in the 1940s, LaMotta and his wife squabble viciously in an apartment no bigger than a boxing ring, and he explodes, throwing over the table, dinner and all, taking time to yell threats out the windows at the neighbor and his dog. Soon he goads his brother into punching him in the face, hard, without making any effort to defend himself. It’s a remarkable, unblinking vision of masochism, a thirst for punishment and abuse made especially awful by the cockeyed grin De Niro sports throughout. He’s proud that he can endure pain, even—maybe especially—outside of the professional setting in which it’s expected.
Jake isn’t entirely horrible. With his dapper 1940s wardrobe, gorgeous body, and killer grin, De Niro sells us on the fellow’s appeal. LaMotta’s “no Olivier,” as he himself confesses in the film’s brief opening scene, nor is he a Cary Grant. Among the local hoods there are several, including the unctuous Salvy, who have better manners, slicker clothes, more stylish miens. But Jake has panache, a sense of play, an occasional twinkle in his eye. On his first date with Vicki, when her ball disappears into an obstacle at a miniature golf course, he’s positively endearing when he responds to her question “What does it mean?” by saying gently, “It means the game is over.” You can see why, even if he weren’t semi-famous, he’d catch a girl’s eye.
But he is a haunted man, and the demons inside him will find a way out, whether in boxing or in some other medium. Often his behavior in and out of the ring seems identical. At times Scorsese slows down the action as the camera gets near to Jake’s perception of things, so that Vicki and the men with whom she interacts seem as much of a threat to Jake as his opponents in the ring. De Niro indicates Jake’s vigilance and predation with just a shade; he never quite reaches the verge of violence. But we know that there is hell brewing inside of him, and the slight churning behind his eyes is almost more frightening than anything he might unleash.
There is tenderness in him, as evinced by the remarkable scene in which he and the underage Vicki come close to having intercourse before his rematch with Robinson. Battered from the first fight (which was just a week or so prior), he insists that she get intimate with him: “C’mere, before I give you a beatin’… Touch my boo-boos.” But then, aroused, he douses his passion by standing in front of a bathroom mirror and pouring ice water on his erection (which, pace United Artists brass, is never shown). The scene is a gripping blend of eroticism and denial, pleasure and punishment, classical beauty (both Moriarty in her lingerie and De Niro with his sculpted abs and chest) and grotesquerie.
But that one blissful idyll is wiped away by the things that happen when he succumbs to his worst impulses. Lost in a jealous rage, he beats his brother and then his wife, holding her face up before punching her, just as he had done to a recent opponent before destroying him. Even though he has thrown a fight and will later be convicted of procurement, this is the worst deed of his life, and it’s no coincidence at all that he subsequently allows Robinson, in their final meeting, to beat him to a bloody pulp. “I done some bad things,” he has told his brother, and at this moment we cannot imagine that he will be able to claw his way back into the good graces of his family, his God, or, most of all, himself.
The final space in which LaMotta’s inchoate self-loathing is realized is the tiny isolation cell of a Florida lockup. There are no mirrors; there is no crowd; there is no opponent other than himself. Howling “I’m not that bad” like a beast, weeping (De Niro was never a good movie crier, but this is prime stuff), he beats his head at least a dozen times against a stone wall, as well as delivering literally scores of punches to it. (The wall, of course, was made of Styrofoam.) He has long sought to bring some sort of vengeance down upon himself, some sort of punishment for his perceived inner evil. Finally, he is left to do it himself. De Niro throws himself so fully into this moment, more violent than anything he’s done to anyone else in the film, in or out of the ring, that we wince in sympathy for the pain in his hands, his head, and especially his heart.
Somehow, though, there is a path to salvation through this abyss. LaMotta emerges not so much a man intact as a survivor; life, like Robinson, has failed to knock him down. We leave him at the film’s end just where we met him at the beginning, in a dressing room at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, rehearsing his extremely dubious cabaret act in a mirror before donning his tux. Preparing for the stage, he recites some of the lines Brando spoke in the back of the car in the famous “It was you, Charlie,” scene from On the Waterfront, an actor playing a washed-up fighter imitating an actor playing a washed-up fighter.*6 There’s something strangely pacific in this bloated shell of a man finding a means to express something inside without resorting to violence, whether against a boxing opponent, a family member, or even (maybe especially) himself.
Despite the wishes of the studio executives who didn’t want to green-light the film, we are not meant to empathize with LaMotta, not in the traditional sense in which a movie’s lead character is an object of identification for the audience. Rather, his journey is emblematic of human struggle through pain, darkness, weakness, and temptation toward solace, strength, peace, and light. He seems to get there, heading off for the stage having pumped himself up with a few flurries of sparring jabs and the mantra “I’m the boss, I’m the boss, I’m the boss, I’m the boss.” But he may be no more cured or healed than Travis Bickle, a cannon that has been strapped back into place but which might again get loose and threaten everything around it, including itself. As a character, he is not a warm figure or a figure of admiration. But he is so fully realized—and the frame in which he has been mounted so exquisitely wrought—that he has become an immortal character, and an astounding achievement by the men who conceived and created him.
It’s hard to recollect a film so widely regarded as superb and so widely reviled at the same time. In Sports Illustrated, Frank DeFord put it this way: “Has any movie ever so utterly lacked soul and yet been so rewarding?” Like the executives at United Artists, critics were thoroughly repelled by Jake LaMot
ta and his story—and deeply puzzled about Scorsese’s desire to bring them to the screen. In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann compared watching it to “visiting a human zoo,” and in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael sounded a similar note, writing that De Niro and Scorsese “are trying to go deeper into the inarticulate types they have done before; this time they seem to go down to pre-human levels.” (This was not proffered as praise.)
But even those who felt an almost visceral repulsion to the film acknowledged De Niro’s power. “If you respond,” Kael granted, “possibly it’s not to LaMotta’s integrity but to De Niro’s; he buries the clichés that lesser actors might revel in.… With anyone but De Niro in the role, the picture would probably be a joke.” Conceded Kauffmann, “Behind his false nose, he assaults us with force, engulfing force so sheer that it achieves a kind of aesthetic stature.” In Time, Richard Corliss wrote, “When the film is moving on automatic pilot, De Niro is still sailing on animal energy.” And David Denby in New York quite aptly captured the dichotomies the film presented to critics: “The truth is that De Niro doesn’t want us to identify. His furious, cold, brilliant performances are a way of saying, ‘Don’t try to understand me, because you can’t.’ In Raging Bull,… he brings all his cruelly eloquent physicality … to a man with a soul like a cigarette butt. He is extraordinary and repellent.”