"Gangs of New York" Review by Adrian Hyland In the early 1970s a group of playful, inspired American filmmakers challenged the limits of cinematic realism, and introduced to mainstream cinema a psychological depth that had been previously found only in European 'arthouse' movies. One of these directors was Martin Scorcese, and the common thread that linked his work with that of Robert Altman, Brian De Palma and even Steven Spielberg was the acknowledgement of the fundamental link between humour and violence. In Altman's "M.A.S.H","McCabe and Mrs Miller" and "The Long Goodbye", in Spielberg's "Jaws", and in almost all of De Palma and Scorcese's early work, there are moments of violence that shock not through the explicit nature of what is being portrayed, but through the often humorous or light-hearted context in which they occur, and through the implicit suggestion that a movie cannot be constrained by its genre. When this aesthetic was first unleashed on the wider cinema-going public in the form of Arthur Penn's phenomenally successful "Bonnie And Clyde" in 1967, many people in the audience were simply confused. Unaccustomed to experiencing violence and humour in the same movie, let alone the same scene, they asked the question: "What kind of movie am I watching?" By the mid 1970s audiences had come to realise that 'what they were watching' was either a Robert Altman film, or a Brian De Palma film, or a Martin Scorcese film. Of these three great directors, whose influence can be felt in most American films of the past 30 years, Altman's movies were the most dreamlike, De Palma's the most technically brilliant, and Martin Scorcese's the most personal. Scorcese introduced a new intimacy to American moviemaking, and watching "Mean Streets" one feels that this is a director who could film someone reading the phone book and give it an emotional charge. Thirty years have now passed since "Mean Streets" acquainted those who saw it with the Scorcese 'tone', the sensuous yet asexual hum that runs through films like "Taxi Driver", "The Last Waltz" and "King of Comedy", and was last evident in his 1990 movie "Goodfellas". After "Goodfellas" he made a conscious attempt, with his remake of "Cape Fear", to prove to Hollywood that he could direct a hit movie. The experiment worked financially: the dire "Cape Fear" remains Scorcese's only box-office triumph. But this businesslike pact with the devil, intended to provide the director with the financial freedom to make the movies he wanted to make, can now be seen as the turning point in his career, and the artistic confusion of his subsequent work suggests that for this filmmaker compromise is deadly. Scorcese's new "Gangs of New York" is the film he has wanted to make for 20 years, and the creative u-turn that was "Cape Fear" certainly played a part in the realisation of the director's dream project. "Cape Fear" proved to studio executives that Scorcese spoke their language; where previously he had been regarded as a 'maverick' he now had the Hollywood clout to secure the kind of funding needed for a big-budget historical epic. Almost anyone who loves movies will have had a sense of anticipation when it became clear that the new Scorcese film was to be his long-awaited adaptation of Herbert Asbury's account of the origins of the New York criminal underworld, but once the inevitable hype surrounding the latest work by the 'greatest living director' had died down it was impossible to avoid the information filtering through the media, which suggested that this almost three-hour epic was somewhat underwhelming. More importantly, Scorcese's previous two films "Kundun" and "Bringing Out the Dead" offered disturbing evidence that the director's muse had deserted him completely. "Gangs of New York" delivers on these gloomy premonitions: it is a movie in search of a tone, confusing and confused, and although it is unlikely there will be anything on offer this year as wildly entertaining as Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as Bill the Butcher, the movie is as impersonal an epic as James Cameron's "Titanic", and parts of the film feel as though they were directed by its producer Harvey Weinstein. It is never boring, but it bears no relation to the originality and immediacy of Scorcese's best work, and at some point I did find myself asking "what am I watching?", because it certainly doesn't feel like a film by Martin Scorcese. It had been suggested by many commentators that in Asbury's book Scorcese had found material tailor-made for his obsessions. After all the director was known primarily for his vivid portrayal of the various strands of America's (and in particular New York's) criminal subculture, so surely this film would be the definitive insider's recreation of the birth of that world. It's a neat theory, but what these people had overlooked was the fact that Scorcese's gift is in the way he sees the world around him, and his best films feel as though they are wrung from personal experience. This is why we feel so close to the characters in "Taxi Driver", "Mean Streets" and "Goodfellas", and why there is such energy in his portrayal of life on the street: Scorcese knows these people, has been to these places, and as a director he has the artist's ability to show us everything through his eyes, so we can feel his passion. He hasn't shown himself to be a filmmaker capable of taking great imaginative leaps into the unknown, and when he tries to, as he did with "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "The Age of Innocence", the crazy vitality and humour of his other films is missing, replaced instead with technical flourishes that reek of hard work. As a famously knowledgeable and passionate student of film history it was inevitable that he would take on the challenge provided by the vast canvas of the historical epic, but his artistic sensibility is unsuited to this kind of film, and it was always likely that his idiosyncratic gifts would be buried in the logistical demands of a movie like "Gangs of New York". The story is one of old-fashioned revenge, set amongst the muddy streets of New York's 'Five Points' region in the late 19th century. As a boy, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) is initiated into the ritualised gang warfare of the 'Five Points'. In a battle between his Irish immigrant brethren the 'Dead Rabbits', and their persecutors, the 'Native Americans', he watches as his priest father is executed by the Natives' charismatic leader, Bill the Butcher, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Their leader slain, the battle lost and regional supremacy yielded, the Rabbits retreat into the shadows of the Five Points, as in the next few years Bill consolidates his victory. He murders and extorts his way to the top of the social ladder, and finds his methods vindicated in his dealings with the corrupt politicians of 'Tammany Hall', who recognise him as a vote winner. By the time Amsterdam returns seeking vengeance, after some years in the metaphorical wilderness, Bill practically owns the Five Points. The revenge scenario, whereby young Amsterdam inveigles his way into Bill's inner circle and through sheer cunning makes his reprisal, sounds delicious on paper, but the team of screenwriters fail to deliver on this promise, because the way DiCaprio's role has been written there is no cunning involved, just macho perseverance. Day-Lewis dominates the movie with his physicality; if in his previous films he has sometimes resembled a coiled spring, then here the spring has been twisted in the wrong direction, and Bill the Butcher's transparent aggression is hypnotic. Day-Lewis projects such strength that for his demise to be plausible it would have had to be the result of being outsmarted in some way, but the filmmakers expect us to believe in DiCaprio's eventual victory as if it were some kind of 'good triumphs over evil' scenario (certainly a first in a Scorcese film). It's not that DiCaprio is miscast: the strength of Day-Lewis versus the gambler's spirit of DiCaprio could have been a classic acting duet, but the character of Amsterdam is a rather bland angry young man, and the harder DiCaprio tries to look manly and driven the more emasculated his acting becomes. Scorcese doesn't seem to have realised that the source of this actor's power is his vulnerability; if Daniel Day-Lewis is an acting animal then Leonardo Di Caprio's gift is for making his characters recognisably human and, like a young Jack Nicholson or Marlon Brando, DiCaprio is at his most vulnerable - and expressive - when playing characters with plenty of outward cockiness, because he is able to suggest what's really going on beneath all that surface bluster. There are a few scenes in "Gangs of New York" where Amsterdam and Bill exchange stares, and I was left wondering how much more interesting (and plausible) the film would be had there been a mischievous twinkle in DiCaprio's eye, rather than the look of a man on a moral crusade. Many of Scorcese's films feel like miracles of casting; not this one. Day-Lewis seems to be the only one really enjoying himself, and the casting of Cameron Diaz is a small disaster - despite their attempts to generate white-hot bodice-ripping sexual chemistry, she and DiCaprio make a more convincing brother and sister. It may be true that Diaz is just miscast, but it's probably also true that she's out of her depth in this movie, and she comes across as a strangely soulless actress, especially when compared with the spirited, eccentric women Scorcese has used in the past. Perhaps Harvey Weinstein had a hand in this piece of casting; certainly his fingerprints are all over the movie. I don't remember Scorcese being reduced to the use of quite this many explanatory flashbacks before, and while the director's previous films were notable for their unconventional narrative structure, the gang of screenwriters assembled for "Gangs of New York" adhere to all the traditional rules of storytelling except the most important one: save the best for last. Despite its disappointments the film achieves a kind of momentum in its first two hours, but the last half an hour is an incoherent mess, and the climactic duel between Bill and Amsterdam is so devoid of feeling as to suggest that George Lucas had crept into the director's chair while no-one was looking. When a great director takes on a project of this scale the most we can hope for is that, even if he or she is ultimately overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of big-budget moviemaking, the finished film bears the unmistakeable mark of its creator. But "Gangs of New York" doesn't feel like a particularly heroic failure, and it is hard to imagine it will ever be held up as an example of the artistry of Martin Scorcese, because the ingredient that makes his best work unique - the tension between naturalistic, almost documentary-like acting and dialogue, and a sensual, heightened visual style - is missing. The characters in this film don't sound like people, they sound like literary creations, and although the fearless Daniel Day-Lewis makes the most of the theatrical opportunities offered up by this stylised dialogue, he is operating on a different plane from anyone else in the cast, and the movie can't bear the weight of his virtuosity. It would be easy to say that the director was let down by his writers, that words like 'tribulation' don't belong in a Scorcese film, but that would be avoiding the fact that this material was never ideally suited to a director who grew up without a book in the house and whose best films have nothing 'classical' about them. "Gangs of New York" needed a director with a feeling for distance, someone who could suggest the passing of time, a Leone or a Coppolla or a Bertolucci. Scorcese can take us in the other direction: he's the least elegiac of directors and in films like "The Last Waltz", "Taxi Driver" and "Goodfellas" he plunges us into that explosive moment, filled with emotion, where we forget all about the passing of time. There are none of these 'moments' in "Gangs of New York", and for those with long memories it may be a dispiriting experience to see the passion of Martin Scorcese compromised by a newfound self-consciousness. — Adrian Hyland studied post-production at South Seas Film & Television School. He now works as a news editor at TV3. ED'S NOTE: Whether or not you agree with Adrian’s verdict that "Gangs of New York" is a failure, the whole enterprise becomes much more interesting (for cinematic transpotters in any case) when viewed on the recently released two disc DVD, thanks to an audio commentary by director Martin Scorcese. While there's no dirt dished on the director's alleged clashes with Miramax's Harvey Weinstein as the production went over schedule and over budget, there's plenty of fascinating insights into what Scorcese was seeking to achieve and how he went about it, thus giving viewers more lines to read between, as it were, regarding what went awry and why. Equally fascinating is the feature that enables one to explore the film's splendid sets from multiple angles, thanks to the utilisation of 360 degree shots. The vast sets were built at Rome's vast Cinecittà studio complex (the facility's place in Italian cinema history was an obvious attraction to cineaste Scorcese) and the attention to detail is indeed remarkable - although you may agree with Salon.com critic Stephanie Zacharek (archive.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2002/12/20/gangs/) that this art department verisimilitude serves only to weigh down the narrative (or, as Adrian has it, Scorcese's "idiosyncratic gifts" were "buried in the logistical demands"). Other bonus features include three featurettes (on costume and set design, and the history of The Five Points area of old New York), a Discovery Channel doco called "Uncovering The Real Gangs Of New York, and - ho hum - the music video of U2's "The Hands That Built America". Definitely worth a look. "Gangs of New York" is distributed by Columbia Tristar, with a RRP of $42.95.