Interesting History but HO-HUM Scorsese

Rating: 5/10 (22 December 2002)

I found this film to be interesting -- or at least to the point of keeping me awake -- and very 'Hollywood' in its construction(s) and scripting. There was seldom anything new or especially creative, yet the film maintained a compulsion to mend and blend its quilt work patches of borrowed things from vintage film archives. Perhaps that something old, something old technique was appropriate to some degree. The cinematic use of the five point road intersections was indeed efficient and cost-effective. We, the viewer, never thought that we left the back lot for more than two minutes. The opening battle between the landed tribes was pure carnage, yet the snow on the ground was dyed Easter egg pink in a very few places which is probably accounted for in its subliminal religious message. There was a grand leap of faith when Leonardo gets out of the orphanage and returns home. At one point in his associating with his past, he returns to a deep underground cave to dig up a relic he buried as a youngster. As fate has it, in the depths of Manhattan granite as he twists and turns down into the caverns dug from by human hands, he finds his relic under full light of a torch still burning on the wall -- almost sixteen years later. By God, there must be a God! Leonardo's mortal wounds (aka Amsterdam Vallon) healed rather fast throughout the story than anybody else's (they were all rapid, actually) as did an ending scalding on the face with a white-hot iron knife -- which miraculously evolved into a mild tinge of color imperfection on the cheek as if kissed by the Hawaiian godds after too much sun on Waikiki (must have been in the DiCarprio contract, for sure). There was one outstanding genius of director Scorsese at the end of the story but which was also borrowed from Hollywood archives. Specifically, there is a battle between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher similar to a showdown between two adversaries such as the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote or perhaps Pepe le Pew. After much repeated carnage (ho-hum) our two adversaries find each other in a fog of bombs-a-bursting or something like that (i.e. stage fog) and there is nobody else on that battle area where previously there were many slain or injured people in this riotous venue. The two of them are down to the last iota of energy, bloody as hell, and still wrestle it out the end. It was probably also at High Noon or something then, too. On this I connected. I always enjoyed the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote and Pepe le Pew. On the down side of this movie experience, I did walk away with the best part of the film -- which must have been within the content of the book or author who penned the story to begin with. I walked away with a sense of history of New York City and perhaps other American towns when immigrants were poorly treated, as they became the bottom feeders in the American economy. That message of power was powerfully evident as the films singular message and which carries forward to this day in both local and national politics in the United States. (Tammany Hall was powerful from its 1789 inception as a benevolent association to mayoral campaigns forward into1950). Scorsese accomplished to deliver history that we never learned in school. American history always has a sanitized version until college and later. My task now is to validate the contents of the film since the script touches American history with some real names to trace and track during the era presented in this film.