Jack LaMotta sat in front of the mirror in the dressing room, facing himself in the mirror and saying a lot of lines. There was almost no expression on his face, and the two lips with the cigar dangling slightly closed one by one, and the words were spit out together with the smoke ring. His body is bloated, and the drooping skin under his eyes forms a huge contrast with the raised brow bones, and a pair of small eyes seems to be hidden in a cave formed by the brow bones and lower eyelids, only looming like a mouse. Poke out the hole, inquiring about the situation outside. Although the former middleweight boxing champion has undergone tremendous changes in the passage of time-the soaring weight, the departure of his family, the financial constraints, the loss of honor-he still enjoys the time of the performance. The small stage of the dilapidated bar gave him a sense of meaning like the highly anticipated boxing ring among the cheering crowd. In short, he is enjoying it.
This is the first and last act of the film "Angry Bull". In the middle of the two acts, it tells the story of a boxer who reached the top of his career and then fell.
Gang stories like "Once Upon a Time in America", "Good Guys", and "The Irishman" tell a class of people. And "Angry Bull" is about a person's life. It is normal for a type of person, a past event, and an era to have a relatively large capacity. A person’s story, although its capacity is not necessarily small, is often relatively concentrated. However, the capacity shown in "Angry Bull" is exceptionally large and rich. It seems that there are countless flavors and infinite tension buried in this seemingly simple story. We can't treat La Motta's jealousy, suspicion, and irritability in the film as simply a character defect or a factor that makes him degenerate. Just as we cannot treat Hamlet's constant delay in his father's plan of revenge as merely his cowardice and hesitation. With an open and unfinished mentality, we work hard to open up the virgin land of La Mota's emotions and ideas, and we may get more.
La Mota is angry. He treated his ex-wife, the fact that he had to maintain his weight, his opponent in the ring, the imaginary rival in his mind, and the one who was finally put in prison. He was so angry from beginning to end. An angry bull couldn't be more apt to describe him. As a boxer, he is called the bull from the Bronx, showing his deterrence on the ring. However, what kind of existence does the bull do? When it sees red, sees blood, and sees everything that makes him excited or even angry, he will attack desperately. However, when the boxing match is over and he has to return to real life, this bull may not be able to adapt to the calm and mediocre real life.
When our protagonist was next to the TV and aggressively asked his brother Joe if he had taken care of Vicki, the audience seemed to see a boxing match in the living room-it was not a close match at all, it was just Jack vs. Joe's. massacre. Finally, under the emotional shock caused by the overwhelming victory, Jack asked directly: "Have you been to my wife?", the two broke up.
Such scenes can be seen everywhere in the film. From the beginning, Jack and his ex-wife, to Jack and Joe, to Jack and Vicki, he has achieved overwhelming victories without exception, just as he did on the court. However, life is not as simple as sports competition. The complexity of life lies in the fact that there are no absolute victories and defeats in life, and there are no absolute winners and losers. Jack looked victorious, he thought he was victorious. Under the spotlight of countless honors and bonuses, he seems to have become a winner in life. His ex-wife, Joe, and Vicki are all defeated by him. He personally knocked them down, drove them away, and everyone in his life left him.
The result is conceivable, Jack actually has a hunch himself. After he hit Vicky for the first time, he said to her: "Don't go, my dear, I am nothing without you." But just like the remorse of a drunkard when he first woke up, his words couldn't resist the addiction again. The weakness of his will when he came up. Finally, a seemingly ridiculous trick completely defeated the former boxing champion, who was already a powerful player both physically and financially. He waved his fist in the shadow of the prison fence window, but there was no audience anymore. , And no family.
Under the lens of old Martin, the image of Jack La Motta probably represents the mental state of all Americans in the 1940s. The panic and anger and anxiety brought about by people after the war, as well as the emptiness and disillusionment that followed, were vividly displayed on the body of "Bull from the Bronx". In fact, anxiety, emptiness, and the resulting emptiness and confusion are the themes often expressed in modern art. The significance of "Angry Bull" to the audience may be to take what we can't clearly discover but actually feel. The feeling is manifested concretely, let alone in 1980.
In fact, Scorsese, who had no interest in sports, was not interested in the life of boxing champion La Mota. However, after suffering from the box office of "New York New York" Waterloo and his own marriage and health setbacks, he was lying in a hospital bed. Scorsese finally picked up the biography of Jack LaMota that De Niro had always recommended to him, and was deeply moved by this ups and downs story. He decided to withdraw from Hollywood, a place of right and wrong after the filming of "Angry Bull". As a result, the film was a success. Instead of quitting the film and television industry, Martin Scorsese received a lot of investment, and eventually filmed films such as "The King of Comedy", "The True Colors of Money", and "Good Guys". "Won the Oscar for Best Director Award, it is not difficult to imagine the important position of the film "Angry Bull" in Scorsese's personal film career and the entire film history.
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