The beginning of Raging Bull finds Jake LaMotta, the former middleweight champion played by Robert De Niro, a sad shadow of his former self — a paunchy middle-aged washout reduced to converting his legacy in the ring to a stilted lounge act.
Yet those old rituals persist backstage, when he’s alone with his demons and anxiously rehearsing his jabs for the big show. “Just give me a stage/where this bull here can rage,” says LaMotta. Though robbed of his dignity and his manhood, he keeps on punching.
There’s a lot of Jake LaMotta in Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), the juiced-up cattle farmer at the center of Bullhead, a slow-burning Belgian thriller that scored an unlikely but largely deserved Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Here, too, we see a man carrying out his own behind-the-scenes rituals, pacing and shadowboxing at home as he injects a battery of testosterone and growth hormone shots into his wiry frame.
Writer-director Michael K. Roskam takes his time in revealing why Jacky needs to shoot up, but that LaMotta restlessness is unmistakable —this bull here can rage.
Inspired by the mid-’90s murder of a Belgian veterinarian who continued to check cattle for illegal substances, despite threats by the so-called hormone mafia, Bullhead initially seems like a rural noir of the Winter’s Bone variety. In the first scene, Jacky comes across as a common thug, bullying an aging cattle farmer into dealing exclusively with his family — or else having his body fed through the business end of a combine. But he’s really a bit player in a much larger and more sinister subculture, and he comes to seem less vicious enforcer than hapless victim.