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| Raging Bull (1980) | |
| Plot Synopsis (continued)
Title card: Pelham Parkway New York 1950 He admonishes Joey for kissing Vickie on the lips when she comes into the house from shopping: "Ain't her cheek good enough for you?...All of a sudden you're like a romance." And then, insanely jealous, he cross-examines Joey for an incident now two years old - the night at the Copacabana when Joey beat up Salvy. Ominous-looking, Jake is intent on having Joey admit that he 'violated' his wife. He misunderstands his brother's loyalty and interprets it as deception [in the process of questioning, Jake violates his own brother-brother relationship]. Joey's refusal to answer the repulsive, perverse questions intensify Jake's suspicions, and make him look guilty:
Left alone with Vickie, with all his rage bursting and seething to come out, Jake goes upstairs to their bedroom where she is making the bed. As he gently strokes her hair and poses paranoid questions about where she went (she answers that she went to her sister's and to the movies to see Father of the Bride), his questions turn toward the night at the Copa. He pulls on her hair, slaps her, and then asks: "Did you f--k my brother?" She breaks free and locks herself in the bathroom. He keeps asking: "Why did you f--k Joey?" He knocks down the door and physically assaults her again, slapping her as he demands: "Why'd you do it?" To break the tension and offer him the psycho-sexual relief from the pressure that he desires, Vickie mock-'confesses.' Ironically, she gives him what he wants, but drives him mad by exploiting his male chauvinism:
Emotionally-charged and poisoned by his inner rages, Jake takes off down the residential sidewalk toward his brother's house. There, in front of his family, Jake goes beserk and accuses his loyal and helpful brother of sleeping with his wife. He pulls Joey from the table and cathartically brutalizes him [a sublimation of the sexual act] as an expression of his unresolved feelings for him. The two wives try to pull him off. He slugs Vickie (the first time!) and knocks her out, and then charges out, finding himself later in his living room in front of his television set without a picture. Vickie returns home, goes upstairs, and begins packing to leave. He comes to her and humbly begs for forgiveness: "I'm a bum without you and the kids. Don't go." At her dresser, she embraces him. Title card: La Motta vs. Dauthuille Detroit 1950 In the corridor of the arena after the fight, Vickie tries to patch things up between the two brothers - but the effort fails. She urges Jake to phone Joey to apologize and "tell him you're sorry. You miss him. He's your brother. You have to talk to him sooner or later." With a big black eye under his hat, Jake takes the receiver in the darkened phone booth, but he cannot speak [and is unable to resolve his emotions for Joey]. Without knowing who is on the other end of the line, Joey lets loose invectives toward the unidentified caller:
(Eighth Fight Scene) As he loses the climactic battle, he stoically stands against the ropes with his arms helplessly at his side. Determined not to be knocked down, to remain on his feet, to be unconquerable, and to prove his self-worth, he is senselessly battered and attacked with a volley of endless punches, but he endures it all. Blood covers his face, and blood is spattered all over his legs. Flashbulbs explode and hiss like mortar fire. After an eerie pause and silence in the fighting, a final punch sprays La Motta's blood onto the ringsiders in their seats. The referee stops the fight in the 13th round ("the hard-luck round") and Sugar Ray Robinson becomes the new world middle-weight boxing champion. Defeated by his life-long nemesis, a mangled, beaten-to-a-pulp Jake cries out and taunts his victorious black rival Sugar Ray in his corner:
As the ring announcer enters and announces the winner by TKO, a massive close-up shows Jake's blood dripping off the ropes. Title card: Miami 1956
Spent and used up, Jake owns a seedy nightclub on Collins Avenue that he has dubbed "Jake La Motta's": "It's a bar, a package store, everything." After a drumroll and the playing of the "Gillette Blue Blades" theme song, Jake takes the spotlight and the microphone in the lounge, fancying himself as a stand-up comedian with rambling, unfunny one-liners and numerous obscenities. With self-deprecating, pitiable, and partially hostile humor peppered with sexist rude jokes, he welcomes the crowd in his disjointed, clumsy nightclub act: "I haven't seen so many losers since my last fight at Madison Square Garden." When a cocktail waitress brings him a drink on stage, he describes her as:
He quickly changes the subject after the foul joke:
Then, he announces that he will be celebrating his 11th wedding anniversary with his wife Vickie, and then is reminded of a joke that reflects his continuing psycho-sexual anxieties - of two male friends who share one woman:
Then, the nightclub comic repeats the verse that was being rehearsed in the film's opening sequence. At a table where he is introduced to State's Attorney Bronson and his wife (spilling a drink down her lap when he takes liberties with her), he rudely jokes about sharing Vickie, revealing his whole life's distrust about men with his wife:
At the bar after his vulgar but mesmerizing on-stage performance, he permits two under-age women to give him sophisticated kisses to 'prove' that they're twenty-one so that they can order alcohol: "I know what a twenty-one-year old kisses like." He pours champagne into five stacked glasses, even after hearing that Vickie is outside waiting for him. Outside in the light of the early morning as she sits in a waiting Cadillac with the car running and the window only slightly cracked open, she tells him that she will be leaving him, and will take custody of the children: "Look, Jake, I got a lawyer, we're gettin' a divorce. I'm gettin' custody of the kids...I already made up my mind. I'm leavin'. That's it. The kids are gonna be with me. And if you show your face around, I'm gonna call the cops on you, all right?" Now separated from his wife, La Motta is awakened in the next scene by deputies from the DA's office, and arrested on a morals charge for soliciting clients with prostitutes in his nightclub - he allegedly allowed an underage fourteen-year-old (one of the girls professing to be twenty-one years old) into the club to pimp - he "introduced her to some men." La Motta claims that he is an innocent middleman:
After being taken "downtown" and then let out on bail, he goes to Vickie in their home and asks for permission to "pick up one thing" - his championship belt from the mantle (propped up in front of the picture of the two brothers 'playing' at boxing). With $10,000 in bribes, he has been told by his lawyer that he can get the case dropped. He noisily hammers the jewels from the belt, knocking dishes from the cupboard. At the jewelers, Jake refuses an offer of $1,500 for the jewels (without the belt). When he can't raise the money, he is detained in the Florida stockade. Title card: Dade County Stockade Florida 1957
Title card: New York City 1958
Now out of jail, he introduces strippers, such as "Emma 48s" in the seedy New York Bar. In a chance meeting outside the Hotel, he spots Joey across the street and catches up with him in a parking garage. Now mellowed with age, Jake hopes for a reconciliation but Joey ignores him:
La Motta begins to find redemption from his primeval brutality. While hugging, embracing, petting, and kissing his brother, Jake buries his head in Joey's neck, and implores Joey to return his love. He affectionately gives him an Italian-American greeting:
In the film's final scene, a return to the scene at the film's opening, a sandwich-board sign (at the Barbizon Plaza Theatre) announces La Motta's nightclub act - a series of dramatic readings - in 1964:
Close-up images fill the screen, as beer-bellied, swollen-bodied Jake rehearses his verbal recitations from great authors in his seedy, backstage dressing room. The room has a bare lightbulb with chain-link pullswitch, a wall plate light switch, a payphone with a graffiti-covered wall with phone numbers, and dangling wooden and wire hangers on a coat rack. Jake is seated at a mirror, reflecting his own image. He is dressed in his tuxedo and shirt (unbuttoned at the top) and brandishes a cigar. He speaks about the famous "I coulda been a contender" scene in On the Waterfront (1954), a scene that has indirect parallels to his own boxing career. Jake speaks of the Marlon Brando / Terry Malloy role of "an up-and-comer who's now a down-and-outer" who confronts his brother Charley, "a small-time racket guy," with intellectual and emotional honesty in a lament delivered in the back seat of a taxicab. In a similar way, Jake realizes how his brother Joey played a crucial role in his own life. In a wooden, flat, stiff manner without emotion or passion, he recites the lines - by rote - while staring at himself in the mirror [the scene recalls the mirror scene from Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), with a loner talking to himself in a mirror]. The words of regret are far from expressing his own torturous struggles, actions, experiences, defeats and degradations toward self-realization and redemption that were presented in the observed images and patterns of the film:
A stagehand [director Martin Scorsese in a brief cameo, and whose shoulder is visible in the mirror] announces that Jake has five minutes. He fastens his tie, and sends himself off with shadow-boxing into the entertainment arena: "Go get 'em, champ." As he grunts off-screen while punching make-believe opponents, the film's final shot closes on the empty mirror as he leaves, mumbling:
The final title commemorates Jake's "once I was blind and now I can see" salvation and new understanding:
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Freeze-Frame Title Over an Image of their Touching
Boxing Gloves: