“Gangs of New York” is not the story of holy immigrants coming together to teach the cruel Nativists a lesson or two. That would be as empty as the reverse story, which might be have been told a century ago. There almost seems to be two themes working against each other. On the one hand the Irish learn to stand and fight together, and even the archbishop comes down to the slum to meet the same fate as his countrymen. Amsterdam finally acquires the respect of Bill the Butcher when he challenges him in the open the way his father did. On the other hand, like so many Scorsese movies, “Gangs” is packed with violence, but only to show how futile it is. The movie begins and ends with the same fight being fought in two different generations, accomplishing nothing but to pile up corpses.
The simplest explanation for these conflicting themes is not subtle: the Old World cannot be moved to the New World, but it cannot be forgotten, and that America is made of looking ahead while holding onto the past. The Irishmen who go over to the Butcher are doomed to fail and meet bloody ends, while Priest himself, for all his admirable qualities, is still supporting tribalism. “Gangs of New York” argues for reconciliation. Amsterdam is the center of the film because, like America, he is the son of two fathers.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s face may be the one getting all the publicity and, while he is an adequate center of action, it is Daniel Day-Lewis’ slimebag Butcher that carries the day. Like the movie itself, and the city created within it, he is part caricature, with his glass eye, his odd limp, and his outlandishly foul mouth. Other featured players include Cameron Diaz as a professional pickpocket and Irish actor Brendan Gleeson as a cynic that Amsterdam eventually teaches to believe in America. “Gangs of New York” is also an enormous technical achievement, creating an old New York as gorgeously hellish as the London of “From Hell.”
For all its gusto, “Gangs of New York” feels like an outsider looking in when compared to many of Martin Scorsese’s other films. “Gangs” is visceral and aggressive, and the characters sharply-drawn, but missing is the first-person insight of “Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Bringing Out the Dead,” “Gangs’” immediate predecessor. Its style and feel at times is more like the work of louder, busier directors like Ridley Scott or James Cameron; the fight sequences use some of the same camera techniques as “Gladiator,” although “Gangs” is about fifteen or twenty IQ points higher. In addition to its Dickensian exaggerations, it is perhaps appropriate that “Gangs” also has a too-thick layer of modern Hollywood gloss. What do I mean by that? Let’s just say no one can pick up a knife or an ax without hearing a little “shink” sound, and that Howard Shore’s Celtic-flavored score is about three times louder and more frequent than it needs to be, which makes it ten times more persistent than the music to “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull.”
While few of these “modern” touches help the film, I admire “Gangs of New York” most of all for its sheer size and ambition. Like “Apocalypse Now,” another notoriously humongous picture, it has its flaws, but it tries harder than most movies and wants to wrap its arms around the world. It has the scope of “The Lord of the Rings” films, but with more substance. I also like films that take religion seriously, and while both Catholics and Protestants—Amsterdam’s two parents—do some pretty lousy things in “Gangs of New York,” they both do some good. In perhaps the film’s best sequence, we see them all pray. If “Gangs” is a cynical film for saying that America was born from squalor, hypocrisy, and tribalism, then its closing shots of modern New York standing tall, while the graves of those warring tribes have worn down to nothing, seem to be saying that the Lord will stand by us if we ask Him to, even if we are off doing the Devil’s work.
Finished December 22, 2002
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