director
Martin Scorsese
screenwriters
Jay Cocks
Steven Zaillian
Kenneth Lonergan
story by
Jay Cocks
based on
the book by
Herbert Asbury
producers
Alberto Grimaldi
Martin Scorsese
Harvey Weinstein
cinematographer
Michael Ballhaus
music
Peter Gabriel
editor
Thelma Schoonmaker
cast
Leonard DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon)
Daniel Day-Lewis (Bill 'the Butcher' Cutting)
Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane)
Jim Broadbent (Boss Tweed)
John C. Reilly (Happy Jack)
Henry Thomas (Johnny Sirocco)
Brendan Gleeson (Monk)
Liam Neeson (Priest Vallon)
Cara Seymour (Hellcat Maggie)
Roger Ashton-Griffiths (P.T. Barnum)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 168m
u.s.
release: 12/20/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other martin
scorsese films
reviewed on this website:
- the
aviator
-
bringing
out the dead
- casino
- kundun
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If it were anyone but Martin
Scorsese behind Gangs of New York, most critics would,
I suspect, advise you to avoid it. Since it is Scorsese, the
reviews have been respectful even when mixed, in honor of the
master's early films. They are genuflecting to a movie god whose
presence is seldom felt in Gangs of New York, a murky,
empty saga that represents Scorsese at both his biggest and worst.
Scorsese had wanted to adapt the material in Herbert Asbury's
nonfiction book for 30 years, and the trials he went through
to shoot the picture and then edit it down to a reasonable length
are by now legendary, so the temptation may be to go easy on
this epic from the critically anointed Greatest Living American
Director. What's the point of defending the movie, though, when
there's very little of him in it? It's like revering a toilet
Scorsese recently used and flushed.
Well, maybe not that
bad (I can hear the howls: "You're likening the new Scorsese
film to a toilet?"). The movie is certainly watchable,
if choppy and impersonal (the choppiness may owe to the reported
hour of trimmed footage). Much has been made of its violent passages,
when warring factions in 19th-century New York go at each other
with knives, cleavers, swords, even metal claws. It's hard to
say how much of the resulting thin flash-cut carnage was genuinely
Scorsese's idea and how much was imposed on him by the MPAA,
but what you're watching is fleeting glimpses of slashing and
bashing in the midst of seething chaos. I'm not asking for slow-motion
close-ups of flying heads and splattered guts, but it would be
nice to have some spatial sense of what's going on; the moments
of mass slaughter, which must have been hell to choreograph,
just feel fake -- fake-seeming brutality surely being a first
in a Scorsese film. Worse, it feels as though Scorsese is aping
the frantic, incompetent hand-to-hand combat scenes in lesser
films like Gladiator.
The story that Jay Cocks has
drawn from Asbury's anecdotal material (with the help of co-scripters
Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan, both of whose knack for
pithy, juicy dialogue is sometimes evident here) is a drawn-out
revenge fable. In 1846, the stolid, noble Priest Vallon (Liam
Neeson), leader of the immigrant gang the Dead Rabbits, readies
for battle with the Natives, led by the vicious and aptly named
Bill "the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). Vallon
falls to the Butcher's blade; his now-orphaned son escapes and
grows up to be an angry young man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who christens
himself Amsterdam. Since there'd be no movie if he didn't, Amsterdam
returns to the Five Points, site of his father's death, where
the Butcher still holds sway, with various politicians and lawmen
(including Jim Broadbent's Boss Tweed and John C. Reilly's too-Officer-Clancy-like
Happy Jack). Amsterdam falls in with Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas),
who remembers him from childhood; he cons himself into the Butcher's
inner circle and into the bed of the Butcher's favorite lass,
the pickpocket Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz).
What with the post-Titanic
Leo craze, people forget that DiCaprio can be a fine actor and
entertainer. (For proof of that, I refer you to the contemporaneous
Catch
Me If You Can.) But as written, Amsterdam simply isn't
a strong enough -- or complex enough -- character to hold the
center of a 168-minute movie, and doesn't give DiCaprio enough
to chew on. The performance is surly and wet; I don't think DiCaprio
smiles more than twice. Where was Scorsese on the set? He all
but ignores Cameron Diaz (whose accent comes and goes, and whose
character scarcely makes sense anyway), and, as usual, he doesn't
have much interest in the film's women in general; mostly they're
puffed-up society femmes or cackling whores, and the alarming-looking
warrior Hellcat Maggie (Cara Seymour), who slashes men down with
her metal talons and takes their ears, gets lost in the crowd
after the first gang battle, occasionally scowling wordlessly
(she has no dialogue) in the middle of the rabble.
No, Scorsese only has eyes
for Daniel Day-Lewis as the Butcher. I'll concede that this is
a riveting figure of mayhem played by a great actor returning
from a five-year hiatus from the screen; Day-Lewis, his voice
as flat and mean as the blades he flourishes, knows the camera
is attending to his every intonation and twitch, and performs
accordingly. But how much of a triumph is it to lord over a movie
that the director hands to you while forgetting about your co-stars?
The Butcher has more life -- and more fun -- than anyone
else in the movie, and it was around the halfway point that I
started understanding Gangs of New York as a 19th-century
rewrite of GoodFellas, with DiCaprio filling in for Ray
Liotta as the gangster who is in, but not quite of, a
violent group of men, while Day-Lewis, a taller and more baroque
Joe Pesci, enjoys being the unpredictable psycho everyone fears.
Why did Scorsese spend three
decades thirsting to make this movie? It's nowhere clear on the
screen. Probably he wanted to wallow in the low, Dickensian origins
of the macho, destructive gangs whose modern descendants he chronicled
so memorably and effortlessly. But he's stuck with a wholly conventional
script and a $100 million budget; you definitely see the money
on the screen -- the elaborate sets were built at the Cinecitta
studios in Rome -- but it registers as flop sweat, not an actual
place where actual people lived, just as the equally cluttered
sets in Robert Altman's Popeye made you feel the strain
and pressure of money. Gangs of New York doesn't feel
torn from Scorsese's obsessions, or even sparked by his curiosity
(as his underrated Kundun
did). Frankly, it feels as if Harvey Weinstein finally handed
him a check to make some sort of Gangs of New York
film, and as if Scorsese, not wanting to blow the chance, rushed
into it with a weak script and a faint memory of why he'd wanted
to film the book in the first place.
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