Meaner Streets
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the midnineteenth-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and the Civil War — the city as wild frontier.
That’s a tall order, and the filmmaker’s ambition looks oversized, if not unmanageable, right from the start, when he stages a pitched battle between a gang of English-descended nativists and a gang of scrappy Irish immigrants that turns their rude little corner of lower Manhattan, the Five Points, into a medieval killing field. If you think Scorsese’s small-time Mafiosi were ruthless, wait until you see what these guys do to each other one winter day in 1846 with axes, clubs, daggers and maces. Their war trophies include ears and noses.
The problem here lies not in the abundance of blood — we’ve seen that before — but in the 160-minute film’s pounding insistence that we also absorb a thin and unreliable history lesson. We learn as much about the Draft Riots of 1863 or the emergence of Irish political power in New York as we discovered about the Civil War in Gone With the Wind.
Not that Scorsese’s oft-delayed, $100 million baby is a flop. He has dreamed of making this picture for 25 years, ever since coming under the spell of Herbert Asbury’s rather less heroic 1928 book about ethnic warfare in nineteenth-century New York, and his strengths as a moviemaker are evident even as his larger social purpose strays. Just as he did in the tough Queens barrooms of Goodfellas and the tea-sipping salons of The Age of Innocence, this most obsessive and observant of directors keeps a firm grasp on the codes of tribal ritual, and if any filmmaker can coax better performances from actors, he hasn’t shown up yet. Taken as a bloody slice of nineteenth-century street life rather than as carved-in-stone history, Gangs is stimulating entertainment. Asbury’s brutish book, now attracting a new cult of readers, is full of period minutiae, which Scorsese captures. But Asbury has virtually nothing to say about New York City’s troubled rise to greatness. That’s all Scorsese, in his new role as the poet of urban mysticism, the Walt Whitman of movies.
The central characters, though well-drawn, don’t generally surprise. Leonardo DiCaprio, beefier now, stars as the hero, Amsterdam Vallon. An orphaned tough, Vallon returns to the rough-and-tumble Five Points after sixteen years in reform school to avenge his father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), slain in the gang fight that opens the film. Vallon’s love interest is Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a quick-fingered swindler and whore with a heart of, well, gold plate. Their common antagonist (and the movie’s most vivid presence) is a vicious nativist bigot named William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) — “Bill the Butcher” to his intimates. Bill’s vast street power and alliance with the corrupt major-domo of Tammany Hall, William “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent), prefigure the next century’s mob godfathers. It is the Butcher who killed Priest Vallon, and Amsterdam means to kill him, in ritual style.
But first Scorsese and his writers lay on some familiar dollops of Oedipal melodrama as the kid play-acts at becoming Bill’s surrogate son and it comes to light that Jenny, too, was once the Butcher’s young charge — among other things.
As portrayed by Day-Lewis, who came out of premature retirement to play this part, Bill the Butcher’s curious mixture of contradictions befits what Scorsese sees as a defining moment in the city’s (and the country’s) history. He is at once a man of honor and an outright savage. Bill’s intriguing patois combines drawing-room niceties with crude street vernacular. The tongue-lashing he gives crooked cop “Happy” Jack Mulraney (John C. Reilly) contains this hybrid gem: “I don’t give a damn about your moral conundrum, you meatheaded shit sack.”
After fighting his way through production designer Dante Ferretti’s impressive array of filthy tenements, bloody slaughterhouses and dank saloons — all of them constructed, at huge expense, on Rome’s famed Cinecitta back lot — Vallon finds his true calling. First he must slay Bill the Butcher, king of the Old Guard. Then, bloodied but unbowed, he must lead his people up from slavery. The pseudo-Biblical elements of this quest and the broader turmoil of the Civil War make for a muddy political picture. But atmosphere always outranks plot in a Scorsese movie, and he deftly keeps us hooked with a dazzling fury of lynchings, riots, cannon fusillades, political assassinations and sexual assignations — all of them calculated to keep our blood pressure high and our eyes glued to the screen. Scorsese’s bloody, bombastic vision of an urban behemoth on the make may be confused and overwrought, but the long wait for Gangs is not without its rewards.
