Jake"Raging Bull" LaMotta, still rolling with the punches

Wednesday evening, 80 year-old Jake LaMotta sat through what must be for him the umpteenth screening of his life as seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese. Raging Bull, the Oscar winning, cult movie based on the boxing champion's career, was playing at NYU's Cantor Film Center as part of the Golden Age of Cinema, a series of classic films selected and presented by film teacher and cineaste Zhenya Kiperman.

Donning a bright red jacket and a white cowboy hat, with the inevitable cigar hanging from his mouth, a sturdy LaMotta saluted the audience, hands held high over his head as if he were in the ring. Constantly cracking jokes and answering many questions by one-liners, he amused the crowd and basked in the spotlight. Taking to a young man who came forward to shake his hand, he displayed a good capacity for self-mockery: "Anybody bothers you, you let me know... and I'll call Mike Tyson." Born in 1921, Giacobe LaMotta grew up in the Bronx in a very rough environment. He was soon fighting neighborhood kids for rent money, prompted to do so by his own father. He turned pro at twenty, earning the nickname of The Bronx Bull with his powerful and relentless boxing style. "When you're conditioned to do these things," he says, "it becomes [a] second nature. I was conditioning myself to be cruel [but] I didn't realize at the time what I was doing." LaMotta later earned the title of middleweight champion; in a career spanning from 1941 to 1954, he fought a total of 106 matches and won 83 of them.

LaMotta displays ambivalent feelings towards Raging Bull, the screen adaptation of his autobiographical book. He seems quite proud of being the movie's inspiration, frequently reciting the scores of nominations and Oscars reaped by the film, yet he doesn't much like the way he was portrayed in it. "I didn't like what I saw there on the screen", says the champion. "It made me look very bad and I did good things too." Indeed, Raging Bull stresses the image of LaMotta as an animal, a reference that is made early on in the film by a neighbor and is repeated by Jake himself towards the end. Scorsese depicts him as being almost undefeatable in the ring and quasi-unbearable at home, hitting wife, brother and opponents alike. The magnificent ring shots, with the camera swirling around a hunched-over DeNiro, emphasize the analogy with the bull, attacking and retreating, pacing and attacking. On the other hand, LaMotta's turnaround, or redemption, is scarcely explained. "I'm not like that," says the champion. "I've changed a lot. I had to or I'd gonna die." Still, he admits, "the film is very, very close [to my life]. You can't invent these things."

Looking back at his 80-year long life, LaMotta does not regret his boxing career, soberly observing that without boxing, he would have ended up in jail. And indeed, this eventually happened in his post-boxing days, when he went from owning glamorous nightclubs to the slammer. But the champ doesn't let himself get down over all this. "You can't think about the past anymore," he comments, "because it's already done. You've got to do the right thing [now]." After having lost his two sons to cancer and to the Swissair 111 plane crash within a seven-month period a few years ago, Jake LaMotta is still rolling with life's punches. He now reiterates the following mantra, which seems to embody his raison d'être, wherever he goes: "All my life I made a living out of hurting people. Now I make people laugh. Helps get me through the day."

Then again, his ways with ladies don't seem to have changed much. LaMotta introduced the woman sitting next to him, jerking his thumb back at her, as "wife number seven". He then proceeded to joke about each one of his ex-wives, enumerating them by their respective numbers. When his current flame spoke up to specify that the filmmaker's choice of black and white was inspired by LaMotta's autobiographical book, Jake shot back at her, without missing a beat: "That's where they got the idea, baby!" In such moments, the champ sounds eerily like his character in the movie and one wonders where La Motta begins and DeNiro ends.

On June 20th, The Golden Age of Cinema series will present One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest, followed by a discussion with director Milos Forman.

© Briana Berg, 2001