"GANGS OF NEW YORK"
168 minutes | Rated: R
Opened: Friday, December 20, 2002
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, John C. Reilly, Henry Thomas, Jim Broadbent, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Carney
45%
A MUST
The grand sweep of this picture simply won't seem the same on the small screen (in that regard it compares to
"Gone With the Wind"
). Even the oversized performance of Daniel Day-Lewis may seem trapped like a caged animal by the confines of the TV. But get the letterboxed DVD and at least you'll get the full scope of the imagery as Scorsese intended it, which will help. So would watching on the biggest screen you can get to. If a friend has a bigger TV than you, offer to bring the movie over.
DVD PIN SPOTLIGHT
"Gangs" will probably be the model flicks ever made with dignified-enlarge sets in place of of creating worlds with CGI effects, and meaningful this makes you rise all the more this catholic 2-disc DVD's best extras: A production design featurette and a 23m walking tour of the entire backlot set (with a multi-angle panorama choice, and Scorsese and genius PD Dante Ferretti pointing out amazing details culled from 150-year-previous photographs), which basically recreated the Five Points exactly as it really was.
Scorsese's commentary track - which is not a running commentary but mostly well-edited audio taken from a very good 2002 NPR interview - is a fairly engrossing listen as he talks about everything from remembering the day he first read the book "Gangs of New York" (Jan. 1, 1970), to how he'd been trying to make the movie since 1977, to his cinematic inspirations (Welles' "Chimes of Midnight" and Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" for the opening battle scene, as an example). It's a cinematic history lesson unto itself.
But why keep both the membrane and the features spread over two discs? Why not one repayment for each like everybody else does it? Since there's no natural intermission in the obscure, and since Scorsese's commentary is show resentment off in mid-observation, it's insoluble to not wonder what the reprimand the DVD corps was thinking.
OTHER MATCHLESS BONUS MATERIAL
Trailers. A unusually comprehensive costume featurette. An in-depth main body text-on-screen "Five Points Think over Guide" greatest of fascinating representation and a slang dictionary. A Discovery River-bed tie-in faithful forth the time period of the real gangs of New York that is long on style, apart from on substance and a little too blatantly commercial.
SOUND & PICTURE
Bonzer mix in 5.1 Dolby & DTS.
Truly gorgeous digital transfer.
In the opening moments of Martin Scorsese's American history epic "Gangs of New York," a galvanized band of 19th Century Irish immigrants, armed to the teeth with axes and swords, emerges from a catacomb hideout beneath an abandoned brewery and kick open a shabby wooden door to reveal an amazing sight: the vast, almost frontier-like streets of lower Manhattan, circa 1846, brought to life in such exacting detail that you can almost smell the horse plop on the muddy roads.
This single shot does wonders for establishing the heavy, gritty, treacherous atmosphere of the muscle-ruled Five Points area in which the film is set. It's a place where falsely accused people are hung by crooked cops to set examples for petty criminals and where fire brigades duke it out in front of burning buildings to determine who gets to fight the fire.
Leading the pack of Irish bruisers is the stouthearted Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), who is subsequently killed in the ensuing violent, snow-bloodying street battle by William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) — leader of The Natives, an vicious anti-immigrant gang, who leaves Vallon's young son, Amsterdam, one angry orphan.
Bill the Butcher, as Cutting is known, is a stovepipe-hat-wearing, riff-raff dandy and a much-feared basilisk of all-American ire. "If I had but guns," he says, "I'd shoot each and every one of them before they set foot on American soil." Nonetheless, he has his own kind of moral code and pays reverence to his slain rival for fighting with honor.
But that isn't enough to prevent Amsterdam from seeking revenge when he returns 16 years later, unrecognizable as a young man fresh from a reformatory, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in one of two great performances this holiday season. (The other is Steven Spielberg's
"Catch Me If You Can,"
opening Christmas Day.)
Finally getting the
"Titanic"
monkey off his back, DiCaprio is renewed in this sweeping historical fiction. With dirt under his fingernails and fire in his belly, he's hardened enough to be believable as he beats down one of The Butcher's ruffians in a bare-knuckle brawl that earns him a position under Cutting's unsuspecting wing.
Scorsese also seems invigorated by finally making this film he's had on the back burner for more than two decades. In fact, he is so enamored of the story — written by Jay Cocks (Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence"), Seven Zaillian ("Schindler's List,"
"Hannibal"
) and Kenneth Lonergan (
"You Can Count On Me"
) — that he gets carried away with the huge budget he's been provided. "Gangs" is conspicuously over-cinematic (crane shots galore) and over-produced.
While its outdoor locations (built on the backlots of Cinecitta Studios in Italy) are transportingly authentic, the indoor sets look like exquisite museums to period grime. Every character looks magnificently scruffy, as if each of their matted hairs was placed exactly where someone wanted it. Every scene is lit to obtrusive perfection and production-designed within an inch of its life. The practical upshot of all this is that the filmmaking sometimes drowns out the plot — especially in the opening street fight, which is rapidly edited with hundreds of cuts and scored with strangely incongruous electric guitar wail. (On the subject, what's with that U2 song over the closing credits?)
Even Day-Lewis gets caught up in the extravagance, throwing himself into Bill the Butcher's complex but inexorable psyche to such a degree that his intense, blustering, strangely sympathetic performance eventually becomes overbearing.
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But the story — symbolic as it is of the United States' ongoing struggle with violence, culture and class values — really grabs hold of you with its powerfully brusque depictions of hard-scrambled life. Its authenticity is aided by the inclusion of real historical figures (Jim Broadbent is superb as notoriously crooked politician Boss Tweed) and monumental events in the city's history (like the deadly, epidemic Draft Riots of 1863).
Late in the game — after Amsterdam has patiently plotted his retribution and found time to fall for a pretty, steely pickpocket (Cameron Diaz) — "Gangs" develops one very pointed problem with its plot. Bill the Butcher lets Amsterdam live after discovering his treachery and beating him within an inch of his life. Then suddenly the kid has built up a gang of his own to rival The Natives, without Scorsese explaining how he rose to power or how he avoided finding an axe in his back. After all, that is a fate delivered by Bill Cutting himself, in broad daylight, upon a sheriff who dared stand up to the ruthless despot of Five Points.
The tag line for this mistiness is "America was born in the streets," and the misty, unspoken actually of that notion comes through quite definitively in the way "Gangs" reproduces one minority group's fight pro an American-hallucinate foothold (and for their sheerest lives) against the same kinds of people who hated Italians after they got habituated to to the Irish and detested African-Americans during the Civil Rights flicker. And while the cinema may not live up to the hype that has surrounded it since its originally scheduled make available matrix Christmas (rumors abound of editing battles between Scorsese and scissor-happy Miramax chair Harvey Weinstein), it is certainly a unequalled, worthy and rousing glimpse into a large of our yesterday rarely (if ever) portrayed in film.