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Gangs of New York
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Reviewed by Ray Pride___________________________________
Martin Scorsese and innumerable conspirators have struggled for almost three decades to produce Gangs of New York, and yet it is a terrible movie. This hellish horror of failed ambition should freeze the blood of any artist who has held too long to a primal obsession and fears that a life's work will be shown up as a Promethean folly.
A respected colleague thinks it’s "the best Western since Unforgiven," and I look forward to his review. But the defenders of Scorsese's poorest pictures of the past decade, like Casino, will surely again sound like minions of a cult, humming Scorsese’s praises just because he’s Scorsese. Those who give Gangs of New York an 'A' for its aspiration will be deceiving themselves about this clotted, overproduced historical epic. This is not Sergio Leone, or Once Upon a Time in Nolita. As with the preposterous raves for the undernourished Bringing out the Dead, the improvident praise for this clumsy, puerile picture has already begun, with Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, the grandest quote courtesan of them all, anointing it his movie of the year.
The violent story is both simple and unduly complicated; a coming-of-age narrative in which a young boy enters manhood by seeking revenge against someone who becomes a father figure to him. Personal vendettas play out against a social backdrop that is readily footnoted, but almost impossible to follow on screen. Leonardo DiCaprio, who is joyously carefree in Catch Me If You Can, is a puffy cipher as Amsterdam Vallon, a young man who exits Hellgate House of Reform after sixteen years into the Five Points, the nation's most reviled slum, in Civil War-era Manhattan. He has one goal: revenge on the gang boss who murdered his father, "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, the baroque character of his garb, lingo and epic hamming screaming Oscar). They share the love of a damaged young woman, a spirited cutpurse named Jennie Everdeane (Cameron Diaz, who gives a focused performance even when her speeches are schematic). There’s a bustle of other characters, particularly well-acted by Brendan Gleeson and also by Jim Broadbent, whose performance as corrupt Boss Tweed is a marvel of harrumphing complexity.
The dandified result is of the variety David Mamet dismisses as "pageant." As lively as a diorama, It preens, it postures; its streets are cluttered with props and costumes and Dante Ferretti’s lovely battered buildings, yet the characters aren’t interesting and its depiction of gang slaughter and the decade’s violent Draft Riots are more self-important than self-explanatory. Scorsese’s many interviews explicating all his sound and fury is about as relevant as the horribly misguided, redundant voiceover. Blood and capital was spilled, we get that point. But it is all indicated instead of dramatized, willed instead of embodied. This is chilly work that attempts a hot surface, wanting to be an operatic rendition of a lost era in Manhattan’s dirty, brutal history. (In this Sunday’s New York Daily News, veteran New York observer Pete Hamill damned any pretense to verisimilitude: "The true tale is part of all our histories, not a simple entertainment, and we ignore it at our own peril.")
Whether Gangs of New York was cut to two hours or ran a full three, as an earlier version reportedly did, I still cannot imagine the jerrybuilt fiction of this epic historical disaster to have any emotional impact. It is history as fever dream; a sweeping narrative of revenge in which the man who seeks revenge is a barely acted nobody, and the one upon whom revenge is wished is a glorious burlesque villain. (It's as if Joe Pesci's sociopath Tommy DeVito was the central character of Goodfellas rather than Ray Liotta's Henry Hill.)
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Release
Date: December 20, 2002
Rated: R
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Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson,
Henry Thomas Produced by: Alberto Grimaldi, Martin Scorsese
Written by: Steven Zallian,
Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese, Kenneth Lonergan
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Distributor:
Miramax
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Review Date: December 20, 2002
