Martin Scorsese’s teeming, sprawling Gangs of New York makes as little sense in its butchered form, courtesy of Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein, as did Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) in its butchered version, courtesy of star Burt Lancaster, who engineered a drastically cut, English-dubbed version purely for American consumption despite the fact that the authentic film had deservedly taken the top prize at Cannes. It was not until the 1980s that Americans had the chance to view, in nearly its entirety, Visconti’s masterpiece. I suspect we will not have to wait twenty years for Scorsese’s own cut of Gangs of New York to surface. In the meantime, we must make do with what we have.
My mentioning Il Gattopardo isn’t incidental. Like fellow Italian-American filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino, who especially drew from it for their Godfather (1972) and Deer Hunter (1978), Scorsese’s epic canvas of New York City in its tribal infancy is deeply indebted to Visconti’s film, which is based on Lampedusa’s novel about the demoralization and disintegration of an aristocratic family under Risorgimento. Indeed, Il Gattopardo has become the constant model for a certain kind of film: one that contextualizes social and family matters in a broad sweep of history that includes war. More than that, Gangs of New York is Scorsese’s heartfelt hommage to Visconti’s film. (It was shot, by the way, at Cinecittà in Rome.) Regrettably, from what we can see in the version thus far released, little else engaged Scorsese beyond the level of the academic. In its current form, Gangs of New York is interesting but in no way passionate. The same, I suppose, might be said about Scorsese’s best film, Kundun (1997), but that very lovely piece of work relied on a sense of Scorsese as outsider looking in (on a past and foreign way of life) that may not be as applicable to Gangs. Rather, I believe it was Scorsese’s intent to explore some of the formative history of the city he loves, and in this regard his film fails to ignite his (and thus our own) blood.
Besides Visconti, the film draws upon Shakespeare and Dickens. The raw, crowded, tenement-decked Manhattan that Scorsese and his craftspeople conjure—the production designer is Dante Ferretti—creates a Dickensian atmosphere, and the boy who is at the center of the plot echoes a good many young, disadvantaged or disenfranchised heroes in novels by Dickens. But the boy in Gangs is on a mission to avenge his father’s death, and this brings in the Shakespearean element. Without doubt, Scorsese and his main scenarist, Jay Cocks (who also came up with the story in the first place), have Hamlet in mind. (Kenneth Lonergan and Steven Zaillian also contributed to the script.)
The protagonist is named Amsterdam. (The Dutch Colonial name of the area was New Amsterdam, which in 1664 became New York when the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, surrendered to the British following a naval blockade.) As a seven-year-old in the Five Points slum district on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Amsterdam witnesses the killing of his father, Priest Vallon, by a mustachioed, blade-wielding man ominously named William Cutting and even more ominously nicknamed Bill the Butcher. This event is part of a massive street battle between two rival gangs. Vallon was the leader of the Dead Rabbits—Roman Catholic Irish immigrants. Cutting is the leader of the Nativists—Protestants who were born in the U.S. Thus orphaned, Amsterdam ends up in the Hellgate House of Reform. This is 1846.
The film as it’s now constituted jumps ahead to the point of Amsterdam’s release in 1862, when the American Civil War is underway. It’s hard to believe that the complete version of the film doesn’t include a glimpse of Amsterdam’s life in the orphanage—material, doubtless, out of Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
Suffice it to say that Amsterdam pursues a course of revenge against Cutting, who, failing to recognize him, takes the boy under his wing. Joining Amsterdam in his mission is Jenny, a pickpocket. (This is out of Oliver Twist!) The main action ends the following year, at the time of the draft riots. Thus two street battles of monstrous proportions bookend the action. Following the action per se is a remarkable montage. In the foreground is a continuous image of a patch of grassy earth, while in the distance there appear, each dissolving into the next, images of the city’s changing appearance over time. In the final of these vistas appear the Twin Towers. This closing series of images reflects on all the film’s prior tumult and turbulence; it is peaceful and quiet. The closing irony—what we know about another change to the skyscape yet to come—is almost unbearably moving.
I had been forewarned about the film’s terribly violent nature. There is no excuse for a film to assault us with violence, whatever the purpose or rationalization. It is certainly a specious argument to say that realism requires this level of violence—the portrait of a violent time, or of violent events, must itself be violent. The logical extension of this absurd argument is that, in order to best and most fully convey a sense of the reality of the violence, the audience itself should be physically attacked as part of the showing of the film. Rather than immersing us in this, or imposing this on us, an artist must marshal distancing techniques and devices so that we appreciate and understand the violence without experiencing it. Scorsese has a bad reputation for indulging his own appetite for violence by vomitting it on screen; this is certainly the case with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974; I have in mind the assault on Alice), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and the worst offender, Cape Fear (1991), a film that is depraved in its degree of violence. As it turns out, Tibet—that is, Kundun—seems to have tempered Scorsese. At least in the version of Gangs that I saw, distancing techniques are almost everywhere employed to keep the incredible amount of violence that Scorsese is entitled to show from becoming violence against us, which no filmmaker is entitled to execute. In particular, his loyal cutter, Thelma Schoonmaker, ably assists Scorsese in conveying a sense of awful violence without seeming to “copy” or reconstitute that violence. In the main, the most gruesome sights are rapidly fleeting points of punctuation. The street battles are as carefully and judiciously composed in this regard as is the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). (I appreciate, however, that different people have different levels of tolerance for this sort of thing.)
Some of the imagery is extraordinary. One example is the cave out of which Vallon’s army emerges for the Five Points battle and into which Amsterdam flees after the death of his father. What a transformation of meanings! In the first instance, the cave resonates with a sense of the barbaric and animalistic nature of the gang warfare; in the second instance, both fatherless and motherless now, the child is in symbolic flight back to the safety and security of the womb.
It is too bad that, in toto, the partial film that we have is lackluster. The complete version probably will not remedy a principal cause of this: Leonardo DiCaprio’s incompetent lead performance. DiCaprio’s girlish voice, demeanor and gait do not help; his voiceover narration rarely hits a nuance; there is no intensity to his acting, even though he is playing a boy who is supposedly driven by hate. At the same time, DiCaprio fails to convey something about Amsterdam that the script seems to indicate: that, like Hamlet, Amsterdam wavers in his resolve to commit his act of revenge. There’s no depth to DiCaprio’s Amsterdam, nor the intelligence that the language of the narration seems to indicate. DiCaprio nailed Johnny Depp in his impersonation of the childish, arrogant “actor” in Woody Allen’s wonderful Celebrity (1998), but he brings no charm, craft or passion to the role of Amsterdam Vallon.
By way of compensation, Daniel Day-Lewis is a hoot as Bill the Butcher. This is a bold, colorful supporting performance. Moreover, Cameron Diaz’s Jenny is dreamily sensuous. The rest of the cast is mostly able. For instance, the boy from E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982), Henry Thomas, is touching as Amsterdam’s friend Johnny Sirocco; on the other hand, John C. Reilly is a cipher as a shopkeeper. Jim Broadbent has a good bit as Tammany Hall’s corrupt “Boss” Tweed, and look for Scorsese’s own cameo appearance.
All in all, this isn’t much of a film.
Dennis Grunes 