It must be a decade or more since I had watched Raging Bull, the film which established the triumvirate of Martin Scorcese, Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci. I had always enjoyed it less than Taxi Driver, while recognising its artistic merits as being equal if not greater than its more melodramatic, arguably less mature predecessor.
Recently I tried watching Rear Window with the intention of enjoying it more than I’d managed in several previous viewings, without managing to attain my goal. It was with a similar presentiment that I sat down at 4.30 one morning last week, having awoken from an excellent sleep that had no intention of returning, to watch a DVD of the film many call the greatest of the 1980s, and almost everyone has in his or her top one hundred.
It was a revelation. Like a good red wine, it had matured over the years. But then I realised it wasn’t the film that had matured, it was me. Somehow I had missed the message of the power of insecurity to wreck lives the first few times round. Some consider it a film essentially about jealousy, but I think they miss the point. This is a film, the film, about insecurity. And why cannot it be equally about both? Because insecurity is a first thing, and jealousy a second thing; because jealousy is the symptom, while insecurity is the cause – itself caused by other things, parental upbringing most important among them.
It might be that to achieve something like Raging Bull it requires the director to be crippled with insecurity himself and to be recovering from drug addiction. It might require a special type of friendship between director and actor, and a special kind of actor who can see the potential in a man who no one has rated as an actor. The result is something that will endure.