Martin Scorsese (2002)
Gangs of New York begins in 1846 and with a sensational confrontation – between the multiple title characters, in the ‘Five Points’ district of Lower Manhattan. The opposing gangs are known as the Nativists and the Dead Rabbits. Both groups are of Irish stock but the Protestant Nativists are relatively well established in America; the Dead Rabbits are Catholic immigrants recently arrived in their new country. The long, bloody fight culminates in the killing of the Catholic leader Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) by William ‘Bill the Butcher’ Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), the one-eyed, rabid psychopath who commands the Nativists. Vallon’s death is witnessed by his young son Amsterdam (Cian McCormack). I knew beforehand that this was a long film but, when the boy seized and made off with the fatal knife, my heart sank at the realisation that it would take nearly three hours for him to avenge his father’s murder, and the prospect of much of the large cast going the way of Priest Vallon in the meantime. After the opening mayhem, the story jumps forward to 1862. The finale, needless to say, is another massive pitched battle, climaxing in the Butcher vs adult Amsterdam mano a mano.
From start to finish, Gangs of New York is spectacular, large-scale film-making, epic in its physical dimensions though not in thematic richness. The production designer was Dante Ferretti and the reconstructions of mid-nineteenth-century Manhattan, with sets built on the exterior stages of Cinecittà Studios in Rome, are especially remarkable. Martin Scorsese’s handling of the logistics is a considerable feat yet this bombastic movie, in spite of the geographical setting and the criminal underworld personnel, is devoid of a sense of the urgent personal engagement that drives Scorsese’s best work. Michael Ballhaus’s lighting sometimes gives the images the look of old sepia photographs come to life but the dramatisation of ethnic issues and of the contemporary political situation, with the Civil War at its centre, isn’t inspired. Gangs of New York also marks the start of Scorsese’s puzzling love affair with Leonardo DiCaprio as a leading man in his films. The boy who plays the child Amsterdam Vallon is so effortful and inexpressive that at least it’s believable that it’s DiCaprio he grows up into. As might be expected, the young man Amsterdam works his way into Bill the Butcher’s inner circle (which now includes some of his late father’s supporters); his new boss doesn’t discover his true identity until a dramatically convenient moment. Before that arrives, there’s a scene in which the Butcher sets his one seeing eye on Amsterdam and says, ‘There’s a rage boiling inside of you – that’s good’. If there were, it might be: Leonardo DiCaprio, to express this boiling rage, sits frowning as hard as he can. The screenplay, by Jay Cocks, Kenneth Lonergan and Steven Zaillian, includes some salty lines. DiCaprio makes them sound corny.
Although there’s plenty of high-pressure acting elsewhere in the formidable cast, there isn’t a convincing boiling rage inside anyone in Gangs of New York. Daniel Day-Lewis looks extraordinary, shouts impressively and throws knives with aplomb. (The actor’s CV makes it retrospectively funny when one of these hits the target of a poster bearing the face of Abraham Lincoln.) But Bill the Butcher is a cartoon villain and Day-Lewis’s energy doesn’t give Bill depth so much as intensify his ridiculous features. Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus reinforce the effect by frequently giving the Butcher’s insatiable violence a pyrotechnical quality. This feels so foreign to what must have been the reality of such savagery that you shrink from the tastelessness of the horror show as much as from the grievous bodily harm (and worse) that the Butcher inflicts on his foes. The film is a vocally bizarre experience: actors from the British Isles wrestle with American accents as American actors struggle to sound somewhat Irish. In the role of the grifter and pickpocket Jenny Everdeane, Cameron Diaz overdoes feisty effrontery and looks too modern but she’s likeably lively. (Jenny, the honorary woman in the story, is the bedmate of both Bill and Amsterdam at different times in her life.) The most persuasive acting comes from Brendan Gleeson, as a principled Catholic (although he weirdly looks younger in 1862 than in 1846), and Henry Thomas (ET), as another pickpocket pal of Amsterdam’s. Jim Broadbent is a Tammany Hall big shot, Eddie Marsan his sidekick, John C Reilly a corrupt policeman and Alec McCowen a pastor. The cast also includes Gary Lewis (at his most apoplectic) and Stephen Graham (whom I don’t think I’d seen in a pre-This is England role until now). The distinctive Roger Ashton-Griffiths is P T Barnum.
11 February 2017
