![]() ![]() There it seemed especially unpleasant because the audience had other expectations raised by the musical genre, but here it works more often because boxing pics are expected to be rough and violent.Īside from the customary genre plot of a boxer selling out to the mob, what seems to be on the minds of Scorsese and his screenwriters is an exploration of an extreme form of Catholic sado-masochism. Scorsese and De Niro made a similar miscalculation in “New York, New York,” in which the lead character also did nothing but rant and abuse his wife for the entire film. That would be fine, since the contemporary audience doesn’t know or care much about La Motta going in, except that the scenes it does choose to show are almost perversely chosen to alienate the audience. The film is not a conventional biopic in that it skips over important stages in its character’s life (such as his rise to fame, his divorce and remarriage, all covered in a quick montage of home movies) in order to concentrate on building up selected emotional high (or low) lights. By the time De Niro – who actually gained 50 pounds for the latter scenes – sits at a dressing-room mirror looking at his puffy face and trying to close the tuxedo collar around his swollen neck, he’s become as grotesque as Emil Jannings in “The Blue Angel.” The relentless depiction of the downward slide of La Motta from a trim contender in 1941 to a shockingly bloated slob introducing strippers in a sleazy nightclub in 1964 has the morbid quality of a German expressionist film. Here De Niro’s antisocial violence is channeled into the socially accepted role of the prizefighter, but in the end he has ruined his body and alienated everyone who ever cared about him, including the audience. Italian milieu of the former and shows it creating psychotic De Niro of the latter. ![]() ![]() Scorsese here blends the work of screenwriters of “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver,” Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, into a film which takes the emotionally tangled N.Y. This bravura tendency makes the boxing scenes so viscerally intense that the viewer will be almost reeling, but Scorsese unfortunately shoots every other kind of scene as it’s a boxing match too. As in other Scorsese pix, the director excels at whipping up an emotional storm but seems unaware that there is any need for quieter, more introspective moments in drama. ![]()
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