too long by 45 minutes

Rating: 5/10 (6 May 2011)

This one has some powerful shots -- the crane shot after the opening battle is pure Breughel and the final series of dissolves (spoiler!) in which the City rises across the river as the graveyard where 'Butcher' is buried becomes a vacant lot is potent. But Amsterdam, unlike Hamlet, is not given enough to do. Hamlet, we recall, puts on a play in which he gives himself away, then decides not to kill Claudius at prayer. Amsterdam just drifts and Leonardo is the victim of many motiveless feet of film. The film, then, is only intermittently telling a story of revenge. Is it telling the story of Tweed's and "Butcher's" alternative views of politics? Now-and-then. Is it telling the story of the buildup to the Draft Riots? That narrative begins somewhere during the second half, and there's a nice juxtaposition between Irish soldiers going to Shiloh and the coffins lined up on the dock. Is it telling the story of Amsterdam's conversion back to Catholicism? That seems to happen, but why? And, of course, Diaz drifts across the landscape, also with a bundle of vaguely conflicting motives. So -- the film, like so much current filmmaking, is incoherent. And for all of post-modernism's embrace of disjunction as a value, that does not make for a satisfying artistic experience.