Partners in Crime: Scorsese and De Niro

Celebrating cinema's greatest collaborations


For the modern filmgoer there are few director/actor collaborations that have been as fruitful as that of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Almost twenty years after their last film together, their collaboration remains an example against which other director/actor pairings are measured due to the richness and quality of the films they produced together. While many of their films together explore similar themes and milieus, the key to the Scorsese/De Niro pairing is that each one explores different aspects of those themes and milieus, and while De Niro has played a number of, lets say, psychologically challenged characters for Scorsese, each one has been crazy in his own particular way.

Review: The Big Wedding (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Justin Zackham
Starring: Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Amanda Seyfried

Don’t RSVP. That joke probably seems easy, but I assure you that it’s funnier than about half the supposed laugh lines in The Big Wedding, a largely hollow enterprise with gender, sexual, and racial politics that would have seemed quaintly out of date when Stanley Kramer was still at his well-meaning best, and seem utterly alien today. I’m guessing that the cast is the only reason this thing wasn’t relegated to straight-to-DVD purgatory, but agreeing to appear in this clunker doesn’t exactly bode well for the state of any of their careers.

Review: Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro

Hollywood doesn't always have a great track record when it comes to depicting mental illness, often resorting to playing it as a "quirk" to be mined for comedy, or as something completely dark and debilitating, prime material for high drama. Rarely is mental illness depicted with any real degree of complexity and nuance - there's "crazy" and there's "movie crazy" and the latter tends to play better cinematically - and though Silver Linings Playbook is a comedy, it takes its subject matter very seriously. It offers a deft mix of comedy and drama, of plot-based and character-based story, and is highly entertaining.

Everybody's Fine (2009)

* *
Director: Kirk Jones
Starring: Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale

To answer the question you haven't actually asked yet: yes, Everybody's Fine is as bland as its title. It's not a good movie, it's not a bad movie, it's just sort of there, inoffensive and somewhat uncertain as to what sort of movie it wants to be. It isn't without its redeeming features, but it's a wildly uneven effort.

The Best Picture Countdown #51: The Deer Hunter (1978)

This post was contributed by Larry Taylor of The Movie Snob. Be sure to head over to his blog and enter his Oscar contest!

Director: Michael Cimino
Starring: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Cazale, Meryl Streep

1978 was one of the more controversial years for the Academy Awards, thanks in most part to Jane Fonda. Fonda, one of the stars of Coming Home, an anti-Vietnam picture that brought Jon Voight an Oscar for Best Actor, was adamant in her support for the film winning Best Picture. But Coming Home would not win the biggest award; that would go to The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino’s controversial, elaborate war drama that was criticized for its depiction of the Viet Cong. Fonda, or “Hanoi Jane” as she was called in those days, was a known sympathizer of the Vietnamese at the time, and was quite upset at what she felt was overt racism in the film. It is well documented now that the events depicted in The Deer Hunter, in the prisoner scenes specifically, were fictionalized. But why were they? We will get into that later.

Michael Cimino’s picture is a most unconventional war film for a number of reasons. Shot in a documentary style, it focuses on a tight-knit group of steel mill workers in Pennsylvania. As we open, there is a wedding on the horizon. It is merely days before some of this group of friends go to Vietnam to fight. Some will not be going. The group of friends includes Michael (Robert DeNiro) the stoic, defacto leader of the group, Stan (John Cazale), Steven (John Savage), Nick (Christopher Walken), and John (George Dzundza). Michael, Nick, and Steven are going to basic training in a few days, then off to Vietnam, but Steven is marrying Angela (Rutanya Alda) before they leave.

The wedding scene is famous in that it runs nearly the entire first hour. The first act revolves around these men, their brotherhood, and the looming discontent of the war and Steven leaving Angela to fight, all the while celebrating a marriage. Michael promises Linda (Meryl Streep) he will watch over Nick, and it is clear that Michael and Linda share a bond that transcends even her romance with Nick. After the wedding and the subsequent party, the group of friends travels to the mountains just out of town for one last hunt before they split. When they arrive, a dynamic to the group is set in stone. Michael will not let Stan – the least responsible of the bunch – borrow his extra boots on principle. Michael is a stern man, a good friend but not one who will let Stan get away with irresponsibility no matter how sympathetic Nick and the others may get. From the hunt we transition directly into a firefight in the jungles of Vietnam.

The opening war scene finds Michael, Nick, and Steven rejoining each other after a fight. The three men are then captured and taken to a prison camp along a river, where the most infamous moments of the picture take place. The prison camp is led by a ragtag group of Vietnamese mercenaries who spend their days betting on games of Russian roulette between the prisoners. While the men are held captive below the hut in waist-deep water, two men are pulled up at a time and forced into a game of roulette. If they refuse, they are sent into a cage almost completely immersed in river water, full of river rats and god knows what else, left to die. Michael knows the game, knows what is inevitable, and takes on his leadership role. This is the moment in the film where Nick, who had been a peripheral figure up until now, becomes more pivotal to the story.

Michael and Nick are pitted against each other in the game. The scene is horrific, tense, mentally crippling for both men. Michael appears to be losing his sanity, requesting not one but two bullets in the gun. Nick is wilting under the psychological torture. But it turns out that Michael has a plan with the two bullets and after some agonizingly tense moments of the game Michael fires on the soldiers, eventually killing them all. He picks up Nick, rescues Steven from the pit in the river, and the three men make their escape. The result of the events leave Steven paralyzed and Nick emotionally scarred beyond repair. But what about the controversy and this most pivotal scene in the entire picture?

The Viet Cong are clearly demonized in this scene. The leader, a shrill screaming man who slaps and intimidates the captive soldiers is a wicked villain, and the torturous psychological nature of the sequence is one of the most unsettling moments in film. But it is all done for a reason. Regardless of the argument that these roulette games never went on in the prison camps in Vietnam, Cimino directs this scene for very cinematic reasons. The emotional and psychological damage these soldiers inflict on the three men will forever change their lives, and the extremity of the situation only amplifies the rest of the film. It may not be fact, but cinema is a world for fiction, not fact. The Deer Hunter was never intended to be a factual retelling of an event in the war. It was intended to show the damage such hell can do to three men with three very different psyches.

Once the men return, they are forever changed. Michael is the first to arrive back home in Pennsylvania, but he decides against showing up for his welcome home party. He stays in a motel instead the first night, opting to come home early in the morning once the welcoming committee has diminished. He comes home to Linda, the only one around at the time, and the two share some touching moments. Michael is overwhelmed with guilt and consumed by the killing, and does not feel deserving of the party. He is also worried about Nick, who has not return from overseas. Nobody knows where he is. Steven, on the other hand, has sustained injuries that have confined him to a wheelchair. He is ashamed and living in a VA hospital, and does not want Angela to see him that way.

The rest of the film involves Michael’s re-acclimation into his life at home – he can no longer hunt deer the way he once could – and his search for Nick. He finds Nick in an underground roulette circuit. Nick has grown cold, distant. The life that was once behind his eyes has died. He plays roulette and wins money to send to Steven, but of course this cannot go on forever. Once Michael finds Nick, it is perhaps too late to save him. Christopher Walken won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as Nick, and Walken – always an actor who utilizes the uniqueness of his face and his reactions – becomes the emotional center of the story, and the most damaged of the three men.

The Deer Hunter is an excellent Vietnam picture, regardless of the controversy surrounding the elements. Despite the ire of Fonda, The Deer Hunter won Best Picture and Best Director for Cimino, who would never reach the heights of this film again. The Deer Hunter is about the levels of damage that war can inflict on different people. It never mattered when these men left Vietnam, when they ended their service, the war would forever stay with them, unless they made their own choices to end the suffering. The emotional weight and scope of the picture is its most powerful element, and without the controversial scenes at the heart, there would be no resonance in Cimino’s vision.

The Best Picture Countdown #47: The Godfather Part II (1974)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, John Cazale

I go back and forth over whether I think The Godfather: Part II is the better of the first two instalments of the trilogy. On one hand, the sequel obviously benefits from having the original as a starting point with much of the set-up already done. But on the other, I think that Part II contains the key elements to the trilogy as a whole. Add to that the fact that the world we enter with Part II is darker, more complex and ultimately more ambiguous than its predecessor, and you’ve got a tough choice to make indeed.

The film tells two parallel stories. One follows Vito (played as an adult by Robert De Niro) who begins life in the village of Corleone in Sicily and sees the members of his family picked off one-by-one by the local Mafioso. He escapes to America, takes the name Corleone and eventually usurps power from the local Don to begin his own consolidation of power. The other story follows Michael (Al Pacino), already in control of his empire and struggling to maintain it against conspiracy within his organization, a Senate committee out to bust him, and his own familial troubles. Family is the crucial element of the film. Vito’s rise to power is shown as a way to safeguard his American family and give them a better life, as well as a way to ensure that he can return to Sicily and avenge the family he lost there. The Don he eliminates holds his territory with an iron fist. When he’s assassinated by Vito, it isn’t framed as a bad act, but as something which will ultimately enable Vito to take care of his family. For Vito, business is a way of maintaining the family. For Michael, on the other hand, family is something that must be sacrificed for the sake of business.

The Godfather: Part II is essentially the story of Michael’s isolation as he drifts further and further away from what Vito established. One brother (Sonny) is already dead at the beginning of the film, sister Connie (Talia Shire) is a mild irritation, someone he has to deal with but whose presence has little effect on his life, and adopted brother Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), once in the thick of things as the family’s consiglieri, is being pushed further and further out of the family business for his own protection, as Michael tries to assure him. His marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton) is already falling apart as she grows increasingly impatient with his empty promises to make the family legitimate. Eventually he will push her away completely and, as in The Godfather, shut the door on her, this time definitively. And then there’s Fredo (John Cazale)…

The key to understanding the trilogy as a whole and Michael as a character lies in the death of Fredo, whom Michael orders to be killed. The first film is leading up to this moment, the moment when Michael is so far gone, so completely enveloped in the “business,” that he can order Fredo to be murdered as if that is “just business” and not personal. Everything in the third film leads away from it and much of that film concerns Michael’s guilt over his act (“My mother’s son,” he laments in Part III). How did Michael get to this point? How did the “good” son of The Godfather, the one least expected to get into the business, end up being the most ruthless of them all? It is perhaps his lack of previous contact with this world that made him so susceptible to it, like someone whose immune system is compromised by sudden exposure to a disease never before encountered.

Fredo is the soul of the film and when he kills Fredo, Michael kills his soul, committing an act he will never be able to fully justify or find redemption for. As Fredo, John Cazale renders a heartbreaking performance. “I’m your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over… I’m smart. Not like everybody says… like dumb… I’m smart and I want respect!” he says to Michael, who responds dispassionately. It’s an emotionally charged role, that of the older brother trying to step out of the shadow of the younger, the brother who is aware that no one believes he is capable of running the show, the one who is forever stuck at the figurative kid’s table. Cazale’s film career was brief, but he left a filmography that any actor would be jealous of, having appeared in The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter in addition to the first two Godfather films. Pacino, Keaton, Duvall and De Niro are all great, but it’s Cazale who really stands out from the crowd as a man desperate to show that he’s as good as his brother while also being so slavishly eager to please the same.

The story presented here is much bigger than that of The Godfather and I know that some become impatient with it, feeling that it digresses too much, that it isn’t as tightly focused as the first. I also know that some prefer Part II because it’s more epic in scope and much darker, showing a Don who is more realistically cold-blooded. But anyway you look at it this remains an excellent film, its story a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

100 Days, 100 Movies: The Godfather: Part II (1974)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Diane Keaton

I go back and forth over whether The Godfather: Part II is the better of the first two instalments of the trilogy. On one hand, the sequel obviously benefits from having the original as a starting point with much of the set-up already done. But on the other, I think that Part II contains the key elements to the trilogy as a whole. Add to that the fact that the world we enter with Part II is darker, more complex and ultimately more ambiguous than its predecessor, and you’ve got a tough choice to make indeed.

The film tells two parallel stories. One follows Vito (played as an adult by Robert De Niro) who begins life in the village of Corleone in Sicily and sees the members of his family picked off one-by-one by the local Mafioso. He escapes to America, takes the name Corleone and eventually usurps power from the local Don to begin his own consolidation of power. The other story follows Michael (Al Pacino), already in control of his empire and struggling to maintain it against conspiracy within his organization, a Senate committee out to bust him, and his own familial troubles. Family is the crucial element of the film. Vito’s rise to power is shown as a way to safeguard his American family and give them a better life, as well as a way to ensure that he can return to Sicily and avenge the family he lost there. The Don he eliminates holds his territory with an iron fist. When he’s assassinated by Vito, it isn’t framed as a bad act, but as something which will ultimately enable Vito to take care of his family. For Vito, business is a way of maintaining the family. For Michael, on the other hand, family is something that must be sacrificed for the sake of business.

The Godfather: Part II is essentially the story of Michael’s isolation as he drifts further and further away from what Vito established. One brother (Sonny) is already dead at the beginning of the film, sister Connie (Talia Shire) is a mild irritation, someone he has to deal with but whose presence has little effect on his life, and adopted brother Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), once in the thick of things as the family’s consiglieri is being pushed further and further out of the family business for his own protection, as Michael tries to assure him. His marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton) is already falling apart as she grows increasingly impatient with his empty promises to make the family legitimate. Eventually he will push her away completely and, as in The Godfather, shut the door on her, this time definitively. And then there’s Fredo (John Cazale)…

The key to understanding the trilogy as a whole and Michael as a character lies in the death of Fredo, whom Michael orders to be killed. The first film is leading up to this moment, the moment when Michael is so far gone, so completely enveloped in the “business,” that he can order Fredo to be murdered as if that is “just business” and not personal. Everything in the third film leads away from it and much of that film concerns Michael’s guilt over his act (“My mother’s son,” he laments in Part III). How did Michael get to this point? How did the “good” son of The Godfather, the one least expected to get into the business, end up being the most ruthless of them all? It is perhaps his lack of previous contact with this world that made him so susceptible to it, like someone whose immune system is compromised by sudden exposure to a disease never before encountered.

Fredo is the soul of the film and when he kills Fredo, Michael kills his soul, committing an act he will never be able to fully justify or find redemption for. As Fredo, John Cazale renders a heartbreaking performance. “I’m your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over… I’m smart. Not like everybody says… like dumb… I’m smart and I want respect!” he says to Michael, who responds dispassionately. It’s an emotionally charged role, that of the older brother trying to step out of the shadow of the younger, the brother who is aware that no one believes he is capable of running the show, the one who is forever stuck at the figurative kid’s table. Cazale’s film career was brief, but he left a filmography that any actor would be jealous of, having appeared in The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter in addition to the first two Godfather films. Pacino, Keaton, Duvall and De Niro are all great, but it’s Cazale who really stands out among the crowd as a man desperate to show that he’s as good as his brother while also being so slavishly eager to please the same.

The story presented here is much bigger than that of The Godfather and I know that some become impatient with it, feeling that it digresses too much, that it isn’t as tightly focused as the first. I also know that some prefer Part II because it’s more epic in scope and much darker, showing a Don who is more realistically cold-blooded. But anyway you look at it, this remains an excellent film, its story a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Goodfellas (1990)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci

Although it doesn’t really succeed in deglamorizing the mafia, Goodfellas comes closer to dissecting our fascination with it than any other film. Based on the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, the film charts the highs and lows, the excitement and tedium of working for the mob and – extraordinarily for a genre that focuses nearly exclusively on the experiences of men – splits the narrative in two in order to tell the story from the perspectives of both Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco).

The story opens with a young Henry Hill, who remembers in a voice-over that he’d “always wanted to be a gangster.” He gets his break at a young age and spends most of his adult life slowly moving up the ranks and becoming friends with Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy De Vito (Joe Pesci). From the beginning, even though the story is told from the perspective of someone who has gotten out of the mafia and who knows that one of his best friends was murdered in an act of mob vengeance, Hill’s voice-over is reverential. He still clearly idolizes the image of the mobster and what it means to be a one. “Anything I wanted was a phone call away,” he tells us at the end. Being a goodfella was something to aspire to and something about which he can be nostalgic because he knows that he’ll never again feel so important. “Today everything is different. There’s no action… I’m an average nobody.”

The voice-overs by Karen Hill are similar in tone. “One night Bobby Vinton sent us champagne. There was nothing like it… [Henry] was an exciting guy. He was really nice. He introduced me to everybody. Everybody wanted to be nice to him.” She knows that her husband is a criminal and in certain respects she’s afraid of that… but it also excites her and you can see that in a scene which takes place early in their relationship, when Henry pistol whips a guy for hitting on Karen then gives her the gun to hide. She admits to us that most women would have ended it there, but the danger which surrounds Henry is part of her attraction to him. In the voice-overs of both Henry and Karen, there’s a sense that if things hadn’t gone so far wrong and had remained as “good” as they were in the early days, there would be nothing for them to regret – even though Henry kills people and Karen is living off of money made from murder, robbery, drugs and prostitution.

But things do go wrong, and spectacularly so. The climactic scenes, when Henry is high on the cocaine that he’s supposed to be selling and convinced that at any moment he’s going to get busted, are some of the most suspenseful scenes ever filmed. Director Martin Scorsese perfectly establishes a sense of claustrophobia and panic here, especially when Henry is convinced that a helicopter flying above is about to swoop down on him. This is the end for Henry, one way or another. But instead of going out in a hail of bullets, or spending life in prison, Henry testifies against the mob and is relegated to the middle of nowhere, an “average nobody” who longs for the days when he was important and life was exciting. In this sense, the film falls in line with other mobster movies by glamorizing/idealizing the lifestyle, but in other ways it also deconstructs the screen image of the mobster and, while the image remains glamorous, it isn’t quite as shiny as it was before Goodfellas took it on.

What really sets this film apart is the way that it deals with violence. These men kill in such a cold, dispassionate way. The deaths here aren’t “glorious” (as bloody as it is, you have to admit that Sonny’s death in The Godfather is framed in such a way to elevate it to the level of mythology); they’re simple, one of many brutal acts these men will partake in during the course of an average day. Take, for example, the scenes following the attack on Billy Batts. Henry, Jimmy and Tommy realize that Batts isn’t completely dead so they stop at Tommy’s mother’s house to get a knife and then stay to have something to eat. There’s nothing extraordinary about the fact that they’re about to kill someone (although they’ll come to regret this particular death later). It’s just one more thing, something that has become utterly routine and devoid of excitement.

Goodfellas would be a strong enough film in based on the force of it’s story (and how it’s told) alone, but it also has the good fortune of being perfectly cast. You really can’t imagine anyone other than Liotta, Bracco, De Niro and Pesci in their roles (especially Pesci given how the “Funny how?” rant is instantly recognizable even to people who haven’t seen the film). It’s the perfect marriage of story to storytellers, and an entirely rewarding viewing experience.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Taxi Driver (1976)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybil Sheppard

“Here is a man who would not take it anymore.” And here is an iconic moment in American cinema, when Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) stands in front of the mirror, preparing himself for battle. “You talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here.” The entire film is, essentially, Travis’ long conversation with himself, his attempt to reconcile one side of his nature to the other, a struggle made all the more intense by his alienation from the world and his chronic insomnia. He is one of the great characters in cinema, the anti-hero to end all anti-heroes, and Taxi Driver is brilliant for the way that it puts us so deeply inside his psyche that we can’t ever really be sure if what we’re seeing is “real” or fantasy, a moment taking place in Travis’ imagination as he looks in the mirror.

Travis is, of course, a taxi driver, having taken the job because he can’t sleep at night anyway, so he might as well be driving. This particular job offers him the opportunity to connect in some way with the rest of the world, to forge some kind of human contact, even if only briefly. However, having the job fails to help him connect with the world around him and he only becomes more disgusted by it, by the things he sees as he drives around the city at night. He actively attempts to make two connections – one to Betsy (Cybil Sheppard), a campaign worker for Senator Palentine, and one to Iris (Jodie Foster), a 12-year-old prostitute. His relationships with these women help to emphasize the dual nature of his personality.

Travis becomes infatuated with Betsy after spotting her from his car. He eventually works himself up to meeting her but fails to read her properly and connect. His jokes fall flat, he offends her by taking her to a porn film, his behaviour towards her becomes increasingly aggressive and stalker-like. His failure to relate to her ultimately stems from the fact that she has a secure position in the world which makes his own seem all the more unstable. She isn’t a woman who needs him to “save” her and their relationship – up to and including his attempt to assassinate Palentine – is marked by impotence and failure. He fails to shoot Palentine, he fails to understand Betsy and make her understand him. With Iris, however, things are different. She needs rescuing and she occupies a place in the world even more unstable than his own, so the balance of power is different between them. He succeeds in saving her, he succeeds in pulling the trigger and killing the dominant male figures in her life. In his relationships with Betsy and Iris, we see the full spectrum of Travis’ personality, the active and the passive, the dominant and the submissive.

Travis is a character who has taken on deep significance in popular culture (especially that image of him standing in front of the mirror) and I find it strange when people consider him in the terms of a rebel who lashes out against the establishment. Throughout the film, Travis is upholding traditional, conservative values, although he takes them to their most extreme. “Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets,” he tells us. He’s alienated by what he sees as the moral decay that surrounds him and the solution, as he sees it, is not social change, but rampage – to quickly and decisively get rid of all the city’s undesirable elements. In the film’s final, blood-soaked showdown he’s not rebelling against the system, he’s eliminating enemies of the system and thereby earning his place in society. The final scenes of the film see him treated as a hero (although there is some debate as to whether these scenes can be taken literally or are just Travis’ dying thoughts) for saving Iris, his attack on the brothel framed as self-defence.

This is a very tense film – it coils around and around until finally exploding in the final scenes. We know that Travis is going to snap; we know because we’re seeing the world through his eyes, seeing what he wants us to see. In one scene he makes a phone call to Betsy, pleading his case to a woman who has already written him off. The camera moves away from him and looks down the hall. It’s because Travis doesn’t want us to see him this way, this vulnerable. He is controlling the narrative. De Niro is perfect at conveying the pent-up anxieties and neuroses of Travis’ character, as well as his growing madness. We watch him hold his hand in a flame, we watch him rock his television back and forth before finally tipping it over, and he doesn’t have to say anything, because we can read it all in his body language and in his eyes. And even at the end, after he’s been accepted into society as a saviour, we can’t really be sure that he’s satiated the demons inside of him. There’s that same intensity to his look, that same tension in his body, and the world is, after all, still the same except that Iris is now back with her parents and her pimp is dead.

The central performance is fantastic – as are the supporting performances, for that matter – and the direction by Martin Scorsese is amazing. He presents us with a very tightly controlled film, limited not just to Travis’ point of view, but to the state of his psyche at any given moment. When the film finally explodes in its final orgy of violence, it comes as a shock to the system even though we’ve been preparing for it from the first moments. Scorsese’s ability to do that – to tell you where the story is going, but still shock you with the fact that it goes there – is the genius of this film.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Raging Bull (1980)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty

Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is a hard guy to feel sorry for. He’s paranoid, he’s mean and he’s abusive and, yes, it all stems essentially from his own insecurities, but still. This is a guy who just won’t help himself, who makes the same mistakes over and over again, who shows control only when he’s in the boxing ring and spends his life outside of it relentlessly punishing himself and the people around him. And yet, by the time you get to the scene where he’s alone in a prison cell, crying and uselessly punching the concrete walls, you do feel sorry for him. Credit due to De Niro and Martin Scorsese for making that possible.

Raging Bull is easily the most poetic of all Scorsese’s films, which is surprising because LaMotta isn’t a poetic character. But when LaMotta is boxing, the film takes on this transcendent sense where even the way blood spatters looks beautiful in its way. The film is never kinder to LaMotta than when he’s in the ring, where no one, even Sugar Ray Leonard, can knock him down. Out in the world, LaMotta is getting knocked down every day – by the mobsters who want him to take a dive and keep the title shot just out of reach until he agrees, by his troubles with the law, his battle with his weight, his paranoia over the fidelity of his wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) – he only ever gets a moment of peace, a moment of grace, when he’s pummelling an opponent and being pummelled in return. He enjoys the punishment of his job, seeing how much he can take and still stay standing. In the scene where he takes a dive, he just stands there against the ropes, letting the other boxer punch him over and over while berating him for not being able to get the job done. Afterwards, he sits in the locker room crying because the guy was “a bum.” He didn’t fall down, but he still lost face in the place where it means the most for him to have it.

We see LaMotta at different periods of his life: at his height, where he’s one of the best boxers in the world, and afterwards, when he’s left boxing, gained weight and begun to trade on his past life for the sake of his new one as a nightclub proprietor. His marriage, which was always strained by his inability to trust Vickie, falls apart. His relationship with his brother Joey (Joe Pesci), falls apart, due primarily to LaMotta’s suspicion that Joey slept with Vickie, but it was probably only a matter of time considering the amount of abuse he’s heaped on Joey over the years. He gets arrested for having a relationship with an underage girl. He comes up with a plan to pay his bond by pawning the jewels in his title belt, which he mercilessly removes from the belt… only to be told that the jewels themselves aren’t worth as much as the belt would have been if it was intact. For me, that scene more than any other is the one where I really start to feel for LaMotta. He just doesn’t get it.

People always talk about De Niro’s physical transformation from young, fit LaMotta, to older, fatter LaMotta. It is definitely impressive, but this is a performance that amounts to more than just gaining weight. This is a fully fleshed – no pun intended – performance by De Niro, who more or less wears LaMotta’s thoughts right on his face. When he’s suspicious, we know it. When he’s struggling to understand, we know the extent to which he is struggling and the direction in which his thoughts are straying. There is never a moment when you think to yourself, “That’s De Niro.” It is always LaMotta and, essentially, two versions of LaMotta: the controlled, intuitive LaMotta in the ring, and the dangerous, out-of-control LaMotta who exists everywhere else.

Pesci and Moriarty also give excellent performances, each playing a character who loves LaMotta but becomes increasingly exasperated by his moods and inability to trust. There’s an especially great moment for Pesci at the end, when LaMotta catches up with Joey after years of estrangement and insists on a hug and Joey just stands there waiting for him to be finished with it. Pesci and De Niro play off of each other wonderfully, really giving the sense of two people with a lifelong history together.

But the acting is only half the battle, and I would be remiss if I didn't emphasize the masterful direction of Martin Scorsese, the cinematography of Michael Chapman, and the editing of Thelma Schoonmaker, who quite rightly won the Oscar for Best Editing. This is a technically beautiful movie, filmed with incredible grace and intimacy, both inside the ring and out. We're given insight into LaMotta's psyche through the way that the film always slows down whenever shooting from his perspective, as if he's memorizing details (most of the slow motion shots involve him looking at Vickie's interactions with other men). We're given further insight into LaMotta's frame of mind through the general narrowness of the composition of the shots. Everything always seems very tight, very closed in, as if to suggest the narrowness of LaMotta's vision. It's a very effective psychological movie and, without a doubt, it is my favourite of all of Scorsese’s films, perhaps my favourite of all of De Niro’s films, and probably the best film to come out in the 1980s.