It’s all very well for Sylvester Stallone to make six “Rocky” movies and for Mark Wahlberg to talk up “The Fighter II” – which will depict Micky Ward’s legendary fights with Arturo Gatti – but “Raging Bull II” appears to be a movie that nobody wants.
Nobody in the media that is: the announcement by Variety (paywall website) three days ago that the Argentinian-born Martin Guigui had started his Hollywood shoot of the prequel-sequel to Martin Scorsese’s biopic of the 1949-50 World Middleweight Champion Jake LaMotta met with a chorus of disapproval from different websites and outlets
The movie’s publicity claims that it portrays LaMotta “before the rage” and “after the rage.” Starring William Forsythe as the older LaMotta and newcomer Mojean Aria as the novice fighter, it actually began production on June 4. The cast includes Paul Sorvino, Joe Mantegna, Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, Natasha Henstridge, Ray Wise, Harry Hamlin, Bill Bellamy, and James Russo as Rocky Graziano, whom LaMotta never fought. The two fighters are linked by their crucial defeats to Sugar Ray Robinson (played by Dre’ Michael Chaney).
Alicia Witt, who plays a troubled woman LaMotta became involved with, has spoken of meeting the 90-year-old Bronx Bull on the set of the film and performing “Me or NY.” LaMotta has been married six times. There is no indication that anyone will be stepping into the shoes of Cathy Moriarty, memorable as Vicki LaMotta, the boxer’s domestically abused second wife, in “Raging Bull.”
Beyond what Scorsese showed, there is plenty of drama to be milked from LaMotta’s life, including the 1960 testimony he gave admitting that he threw a 1947 fight to ingratiate himself with the mob, and the deaths in 1998 of his two sons from different causes. However, the lack of enthusiasm for another LaMotta movie is based on the widespread perception that, despite its poor box-office gross ($23 million) and failure to win the 1980 Best Picture Oscar (which went to “Ordinary People”), “Raging Bull” was unimprovable, a bona fide American masterpiece, and the greatest of all boxing pictures.
It was much more than that, of course: a psychologically complex redemption drama about a working-class man – inarticulate, pathologically suspicious and insecure, all id – who attempts to exorcize his demons by expressing his fury and inviting and standing up to intense punishment. Given that it was written by Paul Schrader, it’s difficult not to read a religious, even Christ-like element, into LaMotta’s battering at the hands of Robinson.
Shot in black and white by Michael Chapman and set shortly after World War II, “Raging Bull,” though not an allegory, captured something of the American vortex in the era of Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, and the Korean War. De Niro and Thelma Schoonmaker, the film’s editor, deservedly won Oscars; Scorsese, Schrader, Chapman, and Moriarty should have done. It would be unwise to judge “Raging Bull II” while it’s still in production, but one suspects it will not manage the first film’s reach or impact.
Scorsese, for one, has distanced himself from the project. "[There's] nothing I could say about it except I don't think I could revisit the material, as they say,” he told British GQ, as reported in the UK Huffington Post. “I think we said what we had to say at that time. All of us moved on. Different aspects of the same story basically keep making the rounds....Rise and fall and self-destruction and the suffering and somehow coming through, in some cases. Coming through the suffering so that you change in a way...
"Ultimately, at the end of ‘Raging Bull,’ he's looking in a mirror and he's at comfort with himself, to a certain extent. He's not fighting, he's not beating himself up. That's all….I really don't know what ‘Raging Bull II’ would be."
Below: LaMotta vs. Robinson in "Raging Bull"
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