GANGS OF NEW YORK
Article courtesy of Andrea Chase of KillerMovieReviews.com

GANGS OF NEW YORK , USA/GERMANY/ITALY/UK/NETHERLANDS , 2002, MPAA Rating : R for intense strong violence, sexuality/nudity and language

Martin Scorsese’s much anticipated, long delayed GANGS OF NEW YORK has finally arrived, and an ambitious, magnificent mess it is. Scorsese’s visual style, his love for detail as a rich setting for his story, is not to be faulted, but the story itself is a sprawling thing that doesn’t so much advance during its 168-minute running time, as linger lovingly over those details.

The theme is revenge and is set in 1862-63. While the more astute among us can glean that writers Jay Cocks, Steve Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan might have been working for the juxtaposition between the birth of modern a New York as a melting pot and the Civil War’s struggle to forge a modern United States. It’s a reach at best shown as we are the anarchy that reigned then and for decades to come with Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall running the city as a fiefdom for the robber barons at the top of New York society. No line better sums that up as when Tweed (Mike Leigh veteran Jim Broadbent) points out that it is always best to be seen to be observing the law, especially when one is breaking it. Plus ca change. . .

But back to our story. The revenge is against Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), known as The Butcher as much for the way he dispatches his opponents as for the actual butchering of animals he does at the back of his tavern, Satan’s Circus. One of the opponents he butchered is “Priest” Vallon (Liam Neeson in an extended, lugubrious cameo). He made the mistake of doing it in front of Vallon’s son, Amsterdam, who grows up to be Leonardo DiCaprio. The rest of the film is Amsterdam, worming his way into The Butcher’s good graces all the while plotting to do him in on the anniversary of his father’s death. And just because it adds a piquant note of texture to the proceedings, that anniversary is faithfully celebrated each year by The Butcher as a tribute to Vallon, the only man he ever killed who was worth remembering.

As a love interest, there has to be one for an epic like this, there’s Cameron Diaz, excellent as a Jenny, a hard-bitten pickpocket whose only use for a heart of gold would be the cash value. Would that DiCaprio were as good, but for all the fire of murderous rage that he’s supposed to be carrying with him, he generates little more than a bad case of teenage angst, and not as well as he did in Baz Luhrman’s ROMEO + JULIET. Go figure. Day-Lewis behind a Snidely Whiplash mustache and an accent that evokes nothing so much as Dustin Hoffman in MIDNIGHT COWBOY, nonetheless acquits himself admirably as the king of New York's Five Points, the slum he rules, and to whom even Boss Tweed is beholden. In fine clothes and dirty fingernails, he’s got a palpable menace and a murderous gleam in his one good eye that cudgels men into subservience with only occasional shows of violence. The best performance, though, is by Henry Thomas as Amsterdam’s boyhood pal who nurses a puppy-dog kind of unrequited love for Jenny and achieves the only real emotional touchstone in the piece.

The real disappointment of GANGS OF NEW YORK is that the meticulous, sometimes dazzling, recreation of that time and place is lost in such a muddled script that is more concerned with giving us a history lesson, such as the rundown of the particulars of the New York gangs, than in delivering a well-paced story. Things such as the opening sequence that presents tenement life as medieval vision of one of Hell’s outer circles or the skyline as it looked then or Boss Tweed’s office filled with exuberantly shaped birdcages are a feast for the eyes and a history buff’s dream, but not a cinephile’s. It’s all wasted on a story that takes the Draft Riots of 1863, an urban war that raged for four days and four nights, and turns into an inconvenient distraction for a would-be climactic gang war. Yeesh. Those few minutes of mobs trashing Horace Greeley's newspaper offices, looting the homes of the rich, and lynching any black person they could find from the nearest lamppost are more compelling, more harrowing, and more interesting than all the rest of GANGS OF NEW YORK put together.

ANDREA CHASE

My Rating:

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