A genuinely impressive, striking and powerful epic

Rating: Null/10 (18 March 2003)

Martin Scorsese's pet labour of love, a project he'd been trying to set up for nearly a quarter of a century, finally reaches the screen after tales of a turbulent year-long production and rumours of constant arguments with producer and Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, namely over its length (Scorsese's first cut came in at over three and a half hours). The end result, however, is more than worth the wait, since Scorsese, shooting in a massive specially-constructed set in Cinecittá, has really given it his all and comes out with one of his most striking and powerful films, even if it's a bit too early to say if it's his best. Sharing the recurrent theme of people caught up in the inexorable march of a history whose symptoms and symbols they are, the film is set against the little-known New York urban riots of the mid-1850s, when the city's slums, an explosive ethnic mix of immigrants from all over the world and resentful first-generation Americans, rose against the tony uptown over the newly-passed conscription law of compulsory military service in the Civil War, setting up an urban civil war of its own. Against this heated political backdrop Scorsese plays out the story of the revenge of Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo di Caprio), son of an Irish immigrant gangleader, on Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), a first-generation nationalist and head of the Natives gang who killed his father on a gang fight. The tensions between Vallon and Cutting are used as metaphors of the havoc around them but also of their own specific codes of honour - a son without a father, looking for one in the man who killed his own, but also a father without a son looking for someone to call a son, both of them willing to sacrifice what they hold as sacred to ensure the survival of the bloodline. Breathtakingly directed by Scorsese in a sweeping, operatic flow, "Gangs of New York" is an old-fashioned political epic that seems strangely attuned to our days and confirms Scorsese as the quintessential American director of his generation and one of the few able to harness material of this scope and size into a film so genuinely impressive.