The Independent Film Channel (IFC) showed Raging Bull this week. It’s one of my favorite films and I hadn’t seen it in awhile, probably three or four years anyway, so I took the opportunity to turn off my computer and dim the lights and get lost in it all over again, shutting out the world. Every time I see this film I’m amazed at how good it is. Each scene tightly crafted and perfect, the brilliant closeups, the pristine black and white, the documentary style storytelling mixed in with moments of pure emotional angst…it’s Marty Scorsese at his finest. Di Niro and Pesci are fantastic. Their performances will rip your heart out, especially Di Niro, whose uncontrollable rage can be seen in every movement he makes, every expression on his face. The screenplay by Schrader and Mardik is out-of-this-world good, and the fact that it wasn’t nominated for an award is evidence of how badly the award shows can miss sometimes. (For example, it lost Best Director and Best Picture to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People in 1980, if you can believe that, UGH.) Highly recommended.

I first read the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates in college. I thought it was all right then, although maybe a fair bit boring. I picked it up again so I could read it before I went to the movie, and it’s amazing what 30 years of perspective can do for a work of art. I have more of an appreciation and sympathy for Yates’ personal struggles now, his difficulties with alcohol and depression, and the obvious affects these struggles had on this classic story of disappointment and loss in America. Although set in the post WWII era, it could just as well have been written today as Yates expertly pulls apart life and society and how we all compromise ourselves to death behind a veneer of comfy cultural conformity. I can certainly understand why the novel might have seemed dull when I was just a kid in college, but today, after having lived, inevitably, some of the disillusionment Yates was writing about, it’s a whole new disturbing ball game. Read it (or re-read it) and reflect. It’s worth it: Highly recommended.

Of further interest…

See the trailer and film clips of Raging Bull at the NY Times site.

NPR story on Revolutionary Road.