Raging Bull review – still packs a punch like no boxing movie before or since

N o matter how many times I see it, I know its hardest punch is coming at the very end and I am helplessly leading with my chin. Director Martin Scorsese flashes up a quotation from John 9:24-26, its verses individually illuminated in succession: “So for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been blind and said: / ‘Speak the truth before God. We know this fellow is a sinner.’ / ‘Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,’ the man replied / ‘All I know is this: once I was blind and now I can see.’”

But has redemption really finally come for Jake LaMotta – the corrupt, self-hating, self-sabotaging and not especially repentant boxer so unforgettably played by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s 1980 classic Raging Bull, incandescent with monochrome beauty. LaMotta ends his days without reconciliation with his wife whom he abused, without reconciliation with his longsuffering brother Joey (an equally unforgettable performance from Joe Pesci). The final act comes with his blandly sentimental, self-congratulatory nightclub act in which this bloated, ruined figure is simply pleased to have survived, as uninterested in moral judgment as the blind man who refuses to condemn Jesus.

Perhaps that is the mystery of Raging Bull: its equivalent of divine grace. The boxing movie is traditionally about redemption and the comeback of the underdog; just the year before, Stallone’s Rocky II – produced, like Ragjng Bull, by Irwin Winkler – told just this kind of story. But Raging Bull was a more brutally nihilist tale, its subject a brawling, misogynist fighter who took a dive for the short end money (like Brando in On the Waterfront), whose championship win was hopelessly compromised by mob corruption, whose decline was