Review of Gangs of New York

by Roger Baldwin

Gangs of New York—Martin Scorsese's most ambitious film in an ambitious career, an epic coming-of-age testament to his favorite place—has enough misfires as to distract from its considerable achievement, fatally so to the many viewers and reviewers who have panned it. The story absorbs so many tired and strained conventions from revenge and romance dramas that they too often camouflage the director's passion for the material, its personal nature gets obscured in the logy fog of B-movies past. Almost unavoidably with epic-sized treatments, especially here, nuance has a tendency to buckle under the burden of fidelity to a broad landscape. Given that, it's a labor of love and a deeply-flawed masterpiece.

Adapted from a 1928 novel, Gangs was some three decades from conception to release and Scorsese returns to home turf, to what constitutes New York's fabric and makes its subcultures. As he did in his best work—Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas; in the sumptuous if stiff Age of Innocence and the unfortunate, overtaxed New York, New York. Gangs is Mean Streets a century earlier, with 1st/2nd-generation Irish Catholics standing in for 3rd/4th-generation Sicilian Catholics. In both, ethnicity and its exclusion are defining features. New York's streets have never looked meaner than in the Five-Points district: a grim, 9th-circle hellhole in 1862-63, midway through the Civil War as bitter, accumulating resistance built to America's first conscription law (which appeared transparently class-discriminating; a $300 fee—an unskilled laborer's annual income—offered the well-born a discount ticket out of the draft). That and the just-announced Emancipation Proclamation generated an escalating rage in the grindingly-poor Irish immigrant community, a people still uncertain what the promised land had to offer them, and who could not fathom fighting a civil rights crusade, a "war for niggers" (many Irish competed with African Americans for bottom-feeding jobs). It peaked in four days of rioting unapproached in property damage and body count until the latter 20th-century racial firestorms of Watts, Detroit and South Central L.A. Gangs centers primarily on the cloistered cocoon of New York City's slums, but ultimately it opens them up to intersect with national destiny.

Gangs is a mix of fact (Boss Tweed, Horace Greeley, the Nativist movement, the draft riots, the Civil War), fiction (most everything else) and general historic correctness (also most everything else). Unlike well-meaning, liberal efforts such as Glory (and all other Civil War era movies) or dishonest, rabble-rousing provocations like JFK, this is a film that captures its moment. What gives Gangs its authority is an immediate empathy for and grasp of historical place and the relentless energy of historical change. Scorsese visualizes a dynamic history lecture without the academic distance and formality of a PBS American Experience installment. Like Apocalypse Now, another problematic, intermittent classic, Gangs drops us in the thick of it. Coppola motor-boated the audience up the Mekong River and into the dense, surreal jungle chaos that was the Vietnam War for many a grunt in the field, and we felt, as did many of them, like stunned, hallucinating participants. Scorsese situates us graphically into a city being reconstructed, during another watershed period. Our nation's financial and cultural center was conceived in a lawless tribalism that makes stereotypes of the wild West seem relatively effeminate. At its best, we're living a time capsule.

The story revolves around Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), son of an Irish immigrant when Ireland's famous potato blight and consequent famine decimated a million of its population and drove another desperate, rough-hewn million to American and other shores. His father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson, in a 10-minute cameo) is killed in street combat between warring gangs by William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, both figuratively and literally a butcher), a proud American nationalist and foreigner-hating xenophobe. Bill runs Five Points' economy at a time when the lines between criminal underworld and respectable society had not yet been clearly drawn. Sixteen years later, freshly-released from an orphanage (which somehow manages to hang onto its young until their early twenties), Amsterdam wants payback. He insinuates himself into Bill's business operations, trust and fatherly affection, awaiting his assassin's moment. Meanwhile he falls for Jenny Everdeane, an enthusiastic, flirtatious pickpocket and one of Bill's girls, played by Cameron Diaz. Their sparring affair, which eats up a lot of screen time, adds little but aggravation to the plot and the screenplay introduces needless and not terribly fresh complications into a strong context. Amsterdam's memory of his father's death and his thirst to avenge family honor become his life's mission. This central narrative thread strives for operatic dimensions, but manages only soap opera. We don't care if he succeeds, it's far less intriguing than the living period details. And we don't want Bill to die, he's the most captivating presence on the screen.

As in Goodfellas and Casino, Scorsese outlines at the outset a capsule summary of the way the city (such as it is) works, with rapid voice-over narration set to a blitzkrieg of condensed, vivid images. We get a heaping helping of some of the what-for's right away, and it sets up a steam-train momentum, which in Goodfellas was a constant, but here gets strapped by the cramping sluggishness of the melodrama. We see, quickly, the multiple gangs, their scams, their passions ("everybody in Five Points loved a good fire"), pastimes (their version of a cockfight—bets laid down on a small terrier battling a regiment of rats), the NYPD (more gang warfare, the municipal police compete for turf with the metropolitan police). It's all about bare-knuckled struggle, one in which the hypertensive directing and awesome, you-were-there sets (Scorsese's team researched the place as diligently as James Cameron's did the Titanic, with handsome rewards) are trapped in fisticuffs with a lackluster script. Gangs would be more successful without its extended dramatic arc, if it borrowed a lesson from the Seinfeld notebook and became a movie about nothing.

Gangs is about passages, from antiquity to modernity. It opens in what looks like an underground cavern as Vallon's gang, the Dead Rabbits, wrap themselves for their first choreographed battle in a ritual that might date back to the druids. Weapons of choice are knives and hatchets, ears and noses are regularly confiscated as trophies (and are used as currency in the clan's bar, where leftover backwash is dumped back into the kegs of beer for efficient recycling. This scene rushes by so quickly it almost doesn't register, such throwaway moments give the movie much of its authenticity). Killing well and dying nobly are the ethical codes, handed down from the old world, that pass, without contest, for law. Bill waxes with reverence and nostalgia about his stabbing of Amsterdam's father. "I killed the last honorable man 15 years ago," his only victim worth remembering, he tells DiCaprio. As Day-Lewis taps his knife's point against the glass eye replacement for the one he tore out in shame after losing a fight to Vallon, for the indignity of having looked away, he wistfully reflects, "that was the finest beating I ever took."

This samurai sensibility is the New York that was not so much a coherent city, as Amsterdam says in voice-over, as "a city someday." New York is a miniature for a continent in the wrenching birth spasms from primitivism toward modern nationhood, and the Civil War serves as its midwife. In the first scene, a monumental battle ends in gruesome victory for the Nativists, among the tribes, and Bill as its chieftain subsequently controls Five Points' black market as his personal fiefdom. In the final climax, by contrast, the authority of the street is defeated by that of the Union army and navy. We bear witness to an era's retirement as rioters and gladiators alike lie dead or scatter before the extending reach of a federal government and its violently-imposed civilization.

Scorsese's contemporary New York movies flesh out subterranean subcultures—Sicilian small-timers, the mob, Jake la Motta—that run parallel to mainstream society. Just out of reach and beyond our attention, an apartheid existence, with their separate codes of protocol and brutal justice, though comfortably familiar in their capitalist aspirations for success. The city here seems no more than the kaleidoscopic sum of its underground elements. Which makes Gangs something of an exaggeration. Five Points was the most wretched of areas (with the distinction of having western civilization's highest crime rate), there was a civilized center. In this telling, the middle class is its own isolated tribe, one that periodically ventures into the urban outback, to make smug proclamations and pity the impoverished hoi polloi. There's a kernel of truth to this, and it makes sense from the populist, ground-level perspective of the movie's people, but doesn't resonate like the best of it. There is no dominant culture for the countercultures to define themselves against, it's a free-for-all of mayhem. Which is the film's point, one that's boldly made, but not altogether accurate.

Martin Scorsese has always worked well with actors. He garnered merited Oscar wins for Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Robert de Niro in Raging Bull, Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, and nominations for de Niro, Pesci, Jodie Foster, Cathy Moriarty, Juliette Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder in other movies. Daniel Day-Lewis contributes one of cinema's indelible performances. One of our generation's most gifted and versatile screen actors, in a very strong field, Day-Lewis makes movies only occasionally, this breaks a seven-year hiatus. It's his most impressive since playing the disabled Irish artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot, where he mediated a Celtic brogue through the stunting buffer of cerebral palsy, with lots of anger, lust and frenetic toe-pointing. Here he speaks New York behind an intransigent, thickly-mustachioed smirk (which somehow expresses the full spectrum of emotion), his is the only character who doesn't occasionally forget he has an accent. But his achievement is more than clever, shape-shifting mannerisms. Some of our actors bring strong, distinctive personalities to the screen, making their characters an extension of themselves. Day-Lewis is of another type, he recedes into the roles he inhabits. Whenever he's on screen, the movie becomes more interesting, and alive. It helps that his character is complex, the only one that assumes human, contradictory layers. Bill is monstrous, but he's also a friend, a cynical opportunist and principled American patriot. As a group he loathes the Irish as contaminating, papist invaders but has abiding affection for the individual Irish he employs and takes under his wing. So long as you don't disappoint him. Day-Lewis radiates sensible entrepreneurial pragmatism, witty likability and an explosive, bullying pathology within the span of a few sentences. It's quite breath-taking, you study him closely, looking forward to his next surprise.

The great Jim Broadbent invests his political boss with a savvy, technicolor exuberance; as William Marcy Tweed, the Tammany Hall power broker who ran the city (until his criminal conviction) in lieu of stable, organic and legal forms of administration and law enforcement. Broadbent's Tweed is amiable, wildly optimistic about shaping New York's future, and corrupt to the bone. Although he occasionally uses Cutting's men as muscle, he's wise enough to realize a 1st-rate city can't run on thuggery. "The appearance of the law must be upheld," he muses, no doubt picturing his formative place in future history textbooks. Cutting, with his medieval warrior ethic, is finally displaced by democracy in the peculiar Tweed form practiced in most 19th-century American cities: ballot-stuffing, but more importantly ballot-buying-embracing and playing patron saint to successive, incoming waves of the unwashed. Granting favors (Christmas turkeys, winter coal, jobs, police protection, recognition) in exchange for the votes of an otherwise resented and dispossessed multitude. It's both a perversion of democratic theory and its transitional triumph.

Brawny Brendan Gleeson gives his minor turn a stern authority as Monk McGinn, the street fighter for a price with 44 well-earned notches on his club (one for every nativist he's pulverized). Hopping on the bandwagon of the emerging political order, he makes a last-minute conversion to fraudulently-elected official, in one brief and very thankless term as sheriff. Like Paul Sorvino's Pauly in Goodfellas, Gleeson acts with his thunderously-motionless physique. He looks like a big potato, gone to seed, though you wouldn't dare tell him. The two leads don't fare as successfully. Cameron Diaz does her best with Jenny (Diaz had a fairly admirable resume in independent movies before she became a famous babe), but like Sharon Stone in Casino (whose histrionics were more painfully excessive than the outsized violence), she seems somewhat out of place, Charlie's time-traveling angel. In a movie where everyone is strenuously grimy all the time, she appears to be given milk baths on the hour. DiCaprio broods well, he's a hard-working kid breaking away from the teeny-bopper stardom of Titanic (he was a comer in the deft, adroit Catch Me If You Can). But DiCaprio is hamstrung in the movie's most overburdened role, a much more inventive actor would be needed to overcome the limitations that are hard-wired into it.

Gangs of New York is a hyperbolic distortion of the past, the Civil War wasn't quite the modernistic rupture in time the movie implies. Gangs, violence and vice remained hallmarks of post-bellum cities, and a veritable tsunami of European newcomers by the turn of the century further fragmented national culture. Regardless, I haven't seen another movie that so persuasively chronicles a chapter in our nation's Darwinian struggle from then to now. If you can separate the wheat from an abundance of chaff it's an enduring piece of work, although a movie so dependent on visual grandeur to make its case might well come across as flaccid on a 21" TV screen.

Read about Gangs of New York in the Internet Movie Database

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