Day 344: Saturday Reviews - Gangs of New York

Martin Scorsese’s sprawling 2002 crime epic Gangs of New York, detailing the nascent days of New York City, and the ferocious denizens who fought and died and were forgotten there, is a mess. It is a self-indulgent, bloated shambles, in desperate need of a stronger narrative through which to channel its sweeping themes.

Taking Scorsese 20 years to bring to fruition, and with a production plagued by arguments between egos, stars dropping out, and an ever inflating budget, one rather wishes the acclaimed director had taken a few years more to get the thing right.

But such is the way of blockbuster filmmaking, where you enter a deal to deliver a commercial product at the same time as tease out a creative work. Where very rich people entrust you with very large sums of money to bring them a return on investment. Where your film isn’t happening for a long time, and then it looks like it could happen, and then suddenly it is happening, and all the forces, the loans, the actors, the producers, the sets, all coalesce, and here you are, and you have to make it work.

Gangs of New York isn’t a great film. But it is a testament to Scorsese that he manages to salvage something watchable - and a hit; it made lots of money - from what is so clearly not a natural winner.

You can feel him struggling at every turn with the thing. Creativity comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and sometimes the muse isn’t there. Essentially it seems to me that when it came to it the film didn’t come together, Scorsese didn’t have the inspiration at the time to make it succeed, but he had too much talent to let it fail. He clings on, tenaciously, sweats out every shot, and the result is… gargantuan, wild, intriguing, often enjoyable, but saggy, lacking cohesion, and it ultimately does not coalesce to explore the themes or impulses that set Scorsese on the path to production.

The sets are lavish, but also clearly sets. It reminded me, especially in the opening, of Pirates of the Caribbean, Thunderdome Mad Max, and Spielberg’s Hook. This is not a good thing.

But my main problem is with the screenplay, and with the characters. The film is positioned as a sweeping conflict between two great men: Daniel Day-Lewis’s ruthless established crime boss, Bill the Butcher, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s young upstart Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is our protagonist; he is on a crusade of vengeance after Bill kills his father, Liam Neeson, in the film’s opening. But take away Day-Lewis’s grandiloquent performance, and Bill isn’t a very villainous villain. He kills Neeson in fair combat, puts him out of his misery kindly, lets his son mourn him, commands his body to not be desecrated, and that his son be paid through school.

All through the film Day-Lewis chews scenery, and his Bill has a glass eye, he throws knives and uses hatchets, he’s meant to be a big bad film character, but his actions, on the page, are always entirely understandable.

Thus Amsterdam's motivations are hard to relate to, and as a character he doesn't draw us through the tale. Later on the film moves towards the idea of shifting morality, a crime world where no one is innocent, where men are drawn to violence despite knowing it will destroy them - a la so much of Scorsese’s work - but where in Goodfellas we empathise with, maybe root for, or at least enjoy the company of, Henry Hill, here there is scant little for us to attach to. DiCaprio acts his socks off, clearly making enough of an impression to inspire Scorsese to cast him in pieces for another decade, and Day-Lewis is exactly as ridiculous as the part requires - but the truth is that neither character in the script is interesting enough.

And it’s not about anything, either. The central struggle is not reflective of the themes presented by the film’s ending, the two characters and their story are not a microcosm for the world, it is simply an extended rivalry (which in fact takes two hours to begin - Christ it's a long film) happening to the backdrop of burgeoning democracy and conscription for the Civil War. When Amsterdam narrates over scenes of Irish immigrants being pulled off the boats, given citizenship and draft cards and Union uniforms, sent back onto boats for the battlefield as coffins are unloaded on the other side, it could be from another film - it has nothing to do with the core plot. You want the themes to be given life through the events of the film, through the characters, the dialogue, the shot choices, through everything. You want your film to always push in the same direction, to be a fractal pattern in which every element reflects and embodies every other.

You don't sense that here. There is lots of showy filmmaking, but scattershot, techniques being abandoned, momentum building then being forgotten.

Like I said, it is not a failure. The performances are all strong. It's a lavish production, and past a certain point, although there isn't enough depth, the sheer width of it all surges over your defences, much like the gathering gang hordes of the enormous battle scenes, and you find that despite yourself, you are being overrun.

But you look at the numbers, the size of that budget, and you are left with the thought: if this is a victory for Scorsese, it is a Pyrrhic one; the cost for such mediocre success is high.