An Over-The-Hill Irishman and a Raging Bull

Despite its ten Oscar nominations, I can’t pretend to be a fan of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Though some critics have praised this story of the mob-directed murder of Jimmy Hoffa as Scorsese at his violent best, I found it too over-blown and too meandering to warrant a 3 ½ hour run-time. But after struggling to watch The Irishman, I felt compelled to look back to the days when Scorsese—though much overlooked in the Oscar department—was truly at the height of his powers.

Scorsese pretty much moved into the big-time in the 1970s. Starting out as a teacher of film studies at NYU, with a handful of indie films to his credit, he fell under the tutelage of my former boss, Roger Corman, who knew talent when he saw it. Having shot the Bonnie and Clyde-ish Boxcar Bertha for Roger, Scorsese made the breakthrough urban drama, Mean Streets (1973), which introduced him to the talents of Robert De Niro. The 1976 collaboration of director Scorsese and star De Niro on Taxi Driver confirmed their artistic partnership. (One year earlier, De Niro had bagged a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in The Godfather Part II. Though he was nominated for Best Actor for Taxi Driver, and the film was named a Best Picture nominee, Scorsese’s directorial contribution to this powerful and still relevant study of all-American mayhem was somehow overlooked.)

Raging Bull became the movie that gave Scorsese his first Oscar nomination (though he did not actually win the statuette until The Departed in 2007). This down-and-dirty biopic of Jake LaMotta tells a small story—about a real-life boxer whose propensity for violence spills over into his private life—but tells it so brilliantly that it cannot be easily shrugged off. Dynamic black-and-white cinematography conveys a dark, edgy mood, and it’s complemented by the razor-sharp editing of Thelma Schoonmaker, whose work here won her the first of her three Oscars. (The other two, as well as her five additional nominations, are all for Scorsese-related projects.) Members of the Scorsese stock company who appear prominently in Taxi Driver include star De Niro and co-star Joe Pesci, who vividly portrays the brother LaMotta can’t always bring himself to trust.

If The Irishman seems like a valedictory of sorts, it’s partly because both De Niro and Pesci pop up in major roles, along with another Scorsese favorite, Al Pacino. (Yes, Schoonmaker was the film editor.) There’s also the fact that The Irishman takes as one of its big themes the passage of time: how hugely people change as the years go by. This is vividly brought home by scenes of De Niro’s Frank Sheehan character in a nursing home, exploring religion as a way to come to terms with the sins in his past. There’s been much discussion about how Scorsese, to make his stars’ younger scenes credible, used a digital de-ageing technique that many found distracting, in order to return his characters to a more youthful appearance. The irony is that Raging Bull too is built around the passage of time. The film starts with the tubby middle-aged LaMotta practicing a dramatic monologue that’s going to kick off an attempt at a stage career. Then we jump to an earlier era in which he’s strong, trim, and boasts a full head of hair. De Niro, ever the perfectionist, stopped production for four months in order to gain 70 pounds so that when he delivers his “coulda been a contender” speech he’s clearly over-the-hill. Too bad that for The Irishman that method doesn’t work in reverse.

Thanks to my radio pal Bob Morris in Fargo, North Dakota, here's a broadcast of me on KKGO, making my annual Oscar predictions. 

Death of a Jock: Aaron Hernandez and the Movies

The big news coming out of the sports world as I write this is the suicide of Aaron Hernandez, who starred as a tight end for the Super Bowl-winning New England Patriots. At the time of his death, Hernandez was in prison serving a life sentence for fatally shooting a friend.  Less than a week after he was acquitted of a double-homicide in Boston, he was found in his cell, dangling from a noose made out of bedsheets. 

Hernandez’s brief life (he died at 27) seems to have been continuously marked by violence. Back in 2007, when he was a seventeen-year-old college football player at Florida State in Gainesville, he refused to pay a bar tab, then punched a barroom employee so hard that he shattered the man’s eardrum. Later that same year he was implicated but not charged in a Gainesville incident in which five shots were fired into a car at a stoplight, wounding two. Pundits say these were classic cases in which a prized jock eluded punishment because of his value to his team and his sport. Star athletes are like stars of stage and screen: their glamour allows them to pretty much get away with murder. (See the strange and disturbing case of O.J. Simpson, who was of course a celebrity in both respects, and whose acquittal on murder charges is very much part of the history of the City of Stars.)

Aaron Hernandez is hardly the first star athlete to combine physical power with a propensity for violence off the field. Some jocks, or so it seems, are fueled by rage that bubbles to the surface without warning. What’s striking is that, given how many movies focus on the wide world of sports, how few of them confront the anger that’s at the center of many athletes’ lives. Instead, sports movies tend toward fun and games, or toward a hagiographic approach in which the athlete at the film’s center seems a candidate for sainthood. Take baseball: such movies as Pride of the Yankees (about Lou Gehrig), The Jackie Robinson Story, Field of Dreams, and 42 tend to idolize baseball players. The characters in Bull Durham are less saintly, but fit into the category of charming rogues.

For me the football-related movies that spring to mind also focus on heroics. See, for instance, 1940’s Knute Rockne, All American. Much more recently there’s Brian’s Song, the 1971 TV movie that became a 2001 feature film: in both the focus of this true story is on the evolving friendship of a black and white teammates  who start as rivals and end as close friends, who close ranks before Brian Piccolo dies of cancer. And football becomes an ennobling experience in such high school films as Remember the Titans and The Blind Side. 

I’m hard-pressed to think of a football film in which the game’s raw cruelty is central to the story. Nor can I recall a football flick in which a character’s full-on aggression is not limited to the playing field. Are there any sports movies that dare to explore flawed men who can’t control their powerful and reckless anger?  I’d suggest looking at films about boxing. The classic example, of course, is Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a gripping biopic about the self-destructive Jake LaMotta. In the more recent The Fighter, it’s the brother (played by Christian Bale) of the main character, real-life boxer Micky Ward, who best exemplifies the self-defeating anger that can ruin a boxer’s life. 

Will the Aaron Hernandezes of the sporting world inspire any movies? Maybe these stories are just too sad to tell.