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Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) says a couple of good
things to his protégé Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) in Creed. One of them occurs when Adonis is
poised in a mirror readying himself to shadowbox. Rocky says, “See that guy
staring at you. That’s your toughest opponent.” The rest of the film is pap and
no match for instance for films like The Fighter, David O Russell’s portrait of
the great Mickey Ward or masterpieces like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Martin
Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which told the
story of Jake LaMotta. Here Ryan
Coogler, who directed, relies on pat melodrama. Rocky is diagnosed with
non Hodgkins lymphoma as young Adonis, who turns out to be the illegitimate son
of the legendary Apollo, steps up to the plate against a seasoned opponent, "Pretty" Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). Are
Rocky and Adonis up for the fight, respectively for and of their lives? But the real question is the fight. You have
boxers and fighters, those who are hard to catch (the boring undefeated Floyd Mayweather epitomizes the former) and those who like to mix up like Tyson, Foreman Frazier, Hagler and Hearns. Adonis is portrayed as green.
He’s had 15 fights in Mexico, but only one real win in a sanctioned bout and he
has his work cut out for him in fighting a world champ. To begin with, in
reality, such an improbable matchup would never happen. Even considering Adonis’
pedigree, the veteran would have too much to lose in such an upset—even
considering that the character in the movie is on his way to prison where he’ll
be serving a long jail term. But putting boxing promotion aside, it’s really hard to understand what makes these
the two Sammy’s run. Adonis starts off looking like a boxer and his opponent is
definitely a classic brawler, but by the end of the fight it’s just the story of Adonis
waking up in the middle of a tremendous beating to become the fighter he's meant to be. It’s a great idea. Send a mildly talented fighter in the ring
against a master and hope something will be ignited. But what would the great Cus D’Amato have advised? What Creed portrays is manslaughter.
Robert De Niro recapitulates his iconic scene from Taxi Driver
, where he fires on imagined enemies, in Raging Bull
, where as Jake LaMotta at the end of his career, having lost everything, he stands alone in the dressing room of a theater reinventing himself as a monologist. Martin Scorsese, who has done for modern American film what the ancient Greeks did for drama, himself appears in the film, in a voyeuristic sequence that recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window
. Hitchcock played cameo roles in all his films, and the score for Taxi Driver was composed by Bernard Hermann, who did the scores for Vertigo and Psycho. Taxi Driver’s ensemble—with Albert Brooks, Cybill Shepherd, Leonard Harris (playing the presidential candidate Charles Palantine) and Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster, playing the hooker/pimp team of Easy and Sport—is the ’70s equivalent of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Then there’s the New York of the ’70s, which is itself a character in the film. Remember the Belmore Cafeteria on 28th and Park Avenue South, The Terminal Bar opposite the Port Authority, Variety Photo Plays on 14th and Third, Playland and Fascination on the deuce? And let’s not forget the guns: the .44 Magnum (making a guest appearance after an earlier performance in Dirty Harry
), the .38 snub-nose, the .380 Walther, the .25 Colt automatic. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd ) says Travis reminds her of Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics: “He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” The only thing missing in Scorsese’s masterpiece, which is currently in revival at Film Forum in a new 35mm restoration, is Deney Terrio’s Dance Fever, a glaring absence in a film that defies the categories of both truth and fiction. Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory
, about an unstable taxi driver (Mel Gibson) obsessed with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
, is only one of many American films that would never have been made without Taxi Driver. In the case of Conspiracy Theory, however, the part got away from the actor playing the lead, and life ended up imitating art.
Escalation is when you say, “I had lunch with Marty Scorsese,” and your envious old college buddy, who has just arrived in town from Des Moines, says, “No way! Gag me with a spoon! How cool is that???” And you go on to describe the meeting you had with Scorsese at The Waverly Inn. “Funny, I don’t know what the hoopla is all about. I thought the mac 'n' cheese with truffles was mediocre and the only celebrity I saw was Chloe Sevigny, whose fellatio scene in The Brown Bunny
was a bore. I’m as voyeuristic as the next person, but once I’ve got the idea I don’t feel the need to revisit the same territory. Actually Scorsese spotted me at the gym. I still like to work the speed bag and I think he was planning to do some kind of boxing film, not really a sequel to Raging Bull, but something about this middle aged Jewish guy who is generally upset and goes to the gym to work out his aggressions. You know how these directors are—I looked perfect for the role and he figured I was going to be another Cathy Moriarity, but then the script was changed and I didn’t get role. Anyway, we went back to Scorsese’s place for a nightcap after dinner and he introduced me to his former wife Isabella Rossellini and showed me his Oscar, and now here I am.”
The locution “the revival of Raging Bull” is quaint when you think about it. But the movie is indeed making a comeback, like its subject made when he reinvented himself as a performer—a transition that, at least according to Scorsese’s film, didn’t come as easily to him as his stalking style of fighting. There is a term in boxing called “walking your man down,” which is what Jake LaMotta did in the brilliantly recreated Sugar Ray Robinson bouts, which are right up there with Foreman and Ali, Ali and Frazier, Hagler and Hearns and, most recently, Gatti and Ward. Parenthetically, there is something about Arturo Gatti’s tragic end (was it suicide or homicide?) that is reminiscent of the decline of LaMotta that Raging Bull
depicts. Fighters pay a price. Jerry Quarry suffered brain damage and one wonders if Ali’s Parkinson’s, like LaMotta’s severe paranoia, was a result of all the blows he took. In his last bout with Sugar Ray, he simply dropped his hands and endured the fury of his opponent’s punches. He couldn’t win that fight, but his victory was to walk over to Sugar Ray’s corner and taunt him with the fact that he never went down. In one scene in the film, the then new-comer and Scorsese discovery Cathy Moriarity, playing LaMotta’s bride-to-be, says to Robert De Niro’s LaMotta, “Nice car.” “Like that car?” LaMotta responds. “It’s nice,” she says. The exchange takes place through the fence outside a public swimming pool in the Bronx. The romance takes off, but the lines, which were plainly improvised, are like the reverse of the expression “a picture speaks a thousand words.” In this case, a few muted words conjure a thousand images. At the end of the film, the once trim LaMotta is now an overweight has-been, rehearsing Marlon Brando’s famous lines from On the Waterfront
, “I coulda been a contender.” The words are comparatively pithy, but the great genius of De Niro, practicing in front of a mirror like fighters shadow box (and reminiscent of his performance in Taxi Driver), is in communicating so much more than what is said.
