WTF happened to Hollywood?
by James Rosen
| June 19, 2018 12:00 AM
“I haven’t seen so many losers since my last fight at Madison Square Garden.â€
Scattered laughs from a strip-club audience greet Jake LaMotta’s opening line as the bloated former champion, portrayed by Robert De Niro in "Raging Bull," makes his standup comedy debut. Released in 1980, director Martin Scorsese’s black-and-white biopic earned De Niro the Academy Award for Best Actor. He turned in a career-defining triumph, one that encompassed both brilliant onscreen delivery and off-screen physical transformations to match LaMotta’s own. The film has consistently ranked at or near the top of all lists of the greatest movies ever made.
In his post-boxing spiral into violence and despair, however, Jake LaMotta hardly possessed the wit or intellect of a standup comedian. Rather, as "Raging Bull" depicts, when confronted by a heckler, the semi-literate ex-pug can offer only the lowest, most graceless and unimaginative retort, favored solely by those too stupid and crass to think of anything else: “F*** you.â€
With his performance at the Tony Awards Sunday night, Robert De Niro, America’s most prominent Method actor, took that final step downward and became Jake LaMotta.
Twice, standing before Broadway’s leading lights, De Niro bluntly exhorted the president of the United States to perform upon himself what the late Tom Wolfe used to call “a quaint anatomical impossibility.â€
And the Broadway Swells — stewards of the American stage tradition, inheritors of Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim — gave a standing ovation.
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