Taking the Mickey Out of History

Rating: Null/10 (22 December 2002)

For those unfamiliar with this expression, "taking the mickey out of" something means kidding it, spoofing it, "having it on." In it's origins, of course, it was yet another slur against the Irish. This film draws upon a real-life historical situation, i.e. Irish immigration and slum life in New York in the 1840s and later (as documented by Charles Dickens in "American Notes," among others) and a real-life event, i.e. the "draft riots" in New York in 1863 that turned into race rioting between the Irish and the blacks, and presents a dramatic tale intertwined with the American Civil War, the greatest intranational cataclysm in our brief history. It's an ambitious undertaking, to say the least.
Our "hero" is the son of a murdered Irish-American gang leader called "Priest" (the great Liam Neeson in too short a role) whose "Dead Rabbits" are seen preparing for battle in some endless catacombs under the slums. Martin Scorsese's trademark fluid camerawork is put to good use as the gang members march along underground until they kick out a door to emerge into a snow-covered street--New York's "Five Points" neighborhood, 1846. (Nice to see a movie with actual physical sets, not computer generated.) There follows a brutal battle with a gang of "natives" led by the chameleon-like Daniel Day-Lewis. (It took me a while to get used to Day-Lewis' accent, especially since no other character has one like it.) After the battle we jump ahead 16 years just as Priest's son, who has become Leonardo Di Caprio, emerges from a prisonlike orphanage. On his way back home to Five Points he flings his Bible into a river, yet later he seeks solace in religious rituals, thus displaying the ambivalence toward religion that's a common theme in Scorsese's films.
Scorsese's narrative approach resembles that of his masterpiece "Goodfellas" with the voice-over and the quasi-documentary introduction to the local characters. "Then there were the Plug Uglies, they spoke their own language..." The period recreation is sufficiently fascinating (hats off to Italy for being so accommodating) complete with period slang ("You needed sand to be a turtledove") that for a while it's enough to follow along without worrying about the plot too much. The movie's trailer suggested this is a revenge story but the hero, who's called Amsterdam for some reason, doesn't seem to be in any big hurry with his revenge, even coming under the wing of the same gangster who killed his father and now seems to be the "Don" of the neighborhood. For a while we're not even sure he still wants revenge, which I enjoyed, because in "real life" we're also not always entirely sure what we want, or how to go about it. Inevitably a romantic element arises, then the plot wheels start to grind.
This is when "Gangs" starts to feel forced, as all the elements need to mesh in a timely manner.

**** POSSIBLE SPOILERS FROM HERE ONWARDS ******

The jump-start comes when Amsterdam's pallid friend Johnny gives away his true identity to Bill "the Butcher," apparently because the beautiful pickpocket whom he'd courted chose Amsterdam instead. This made me groan a little; I mean jeez, it's SUCH a movie commonplace, how we male people supposedly think with our reproductive organs. It doesn't seem to occur to our Johnny that he'll be killed one way or another, so maybe he IS thinking with his "little head." The Butcher then becomes very surly but allows his duplicitous protege to live so that, of course, the movie's opening scene can be reprised. But by now we also have the Big Historical Events going on, and shortly there is so much violence from so many quarters--the two gangs preparing to rumble, and the race riots, and the Civil War, and windows breaking, and cannons going off, and beatings and lynchings and stabbings and shootings and bashings--that what emerges is not so much catharsis as shellshock. When it finally comes down to the two crippled warriors blearily staring each other down through the gunsmoke, it's almost a relief knowing one or both of them will finally die. The ending, a series of fast-forward dissolves reminiscent of "Zardoz" and others, is definitely a "downer," but at least exudes a kind of calmness.
Bottom line: Less would have been More here. The story we thought we saw outlined in the trailer would have been plenty involving, as was Henry Hill's story in "GoodFellas," and all the social commentary could have ensued from it. Too many characters jockey for prominence here. For a while it seems to be Amsterdam's movie, and then Bill the Butcher's, and then William "Boss" Tweed's and then someone else's. Someone like Robert Altman can pull off such a kaleidoscopic effort because an Altman flick is like a jazz tune, each element being a riff, but for the detail-obsessed Scorsese, each element gets the full orchestration treatment. He doesn't know how to soft-pedal anything. Insofar as he was working from a story by the visionary former film critic Jay Cocks, he would have been well served to remember a movie from 1955 called "Night of the Hunter" with a script by visionary former film critic James Agee that novice director Charles Laughton honed into an intimate little story over which the gloomy Depression stuff loomed without being obtrusive. "Gangs" cries out for this kind of intimacy. I'm profoundly sorry someone like Paul Schrader wasn't available to write the screenplay, but I guess he was busy with "Auto Focus."
Fine acting all around. Day-Lewis' melancholy monster is the character you'll remember most. Some have griped that Cameron Diaz looks too good, but hey, this is (the spirit of) Hollywood, get over it. (Does anyone remember Scorsese's "New York New York"? Even his indie stuff was stylized. He was never Mr. Realism.) Some have griped about the accents. Well, Di Caprio and Diaz were supposed to be "Irish-American" not Irish and anyway, who really knows how anybody sounded in the era before voice recordings? As always with Scorsese, there's effective editing and use of music and pull-no-punches violence both physical and verbal---and yeah, they did use the F-word even back then. And that camera work--I just need to mention one shot where we see a line of new Union soldiers marching along , the camera follows them backwards up to their boat and then up and back and over back to the docks where we see a coffin being unloaded from the same boat, pull back to see a line of coffins on the same dock--it's only a minute or two in length, it's visual poetry and it speaks volumes. God bless you, Martin, you are the ONLY director whose name alone will get me into a movie theater.

The novel "Andersonville" by MacKinlay Kantor has a hellish subplot about New York gangs from this same era. "And if they ever hang me, they'll have to hang me twice...."