A festival of overacting

Rating: Null/10 (27 March 2006)

A festival of overacting, over-the-top, and gratuitous violence. The plot is predictable and monotonous. Worst of all this film gives me a tremendous sense of a missed opportunity. So much movie; so little outcome.
The plot left us only two possible Hollywood endings, the first that Amsterdam would kill Bill the Butcher and the second that he would be unable or unwilling to kill him when a position to do it because of conscience or a growing mutual or unilateral affection. A possible variation of the second might be that he had to kill Bill though he no longer wanted to do so. The ending turned out to be the cheap and predictable choice, since that's what the audience had been conditioned to want by Bill's evil antics and Scorsese's manipulation. But it went as flat as a Perrier that's been standing too long.
If, as Francis Bacon put it, 'revenge is a dish best eaten cold', Amsterdam almost carried it, but the act of revenge itself was an anti-climax because of the violence which preceded it. Certainly, when compared with the drama of a build-up to a denouement in westerns like High Noon, it paled. Scorsese fell into the deep crevasse between drama (well, melodrama, if you want) and documentary, so the violence of the riot also served to numb us to the supposed climax. Bill the Butcher, so flamboyant and threatening, went out with a whimper on the hilarious line, 'At least I died an American'. Stanley Kubrick would laugh; Peter Sellars howl. My stomach turned. Could the millions of dollars not buy a better exit line? Daniel Day-Lewis was so far over the top, he must have suffered from vertigo for weeks after. A patch over his eye, a crutch under his arm and a parrot on his shoulder and he would have been a great Long John Silver in a Christmas pantomime on Blackpool Pier. I expected at any moment to hear 'Aye, Jim lad' or 'Avast there me hearties'. Alas, no. This was far worse. And the accent, surely not of the 19th century, but of thirties gangster movies, its only function to mark Bill as a 'native'? What a pity none of the other 'natives' spoke like that, failing which the various groups should have been color coded with rosettes or given football shirts.
If Day-Lewis was over the top, most of the other characters were no more than cardboard cutouts. Di Caprio showed he has not developed his acting ability since that appalling production of 'The Man in the Iron Mask' in which he played the most forgettable Prince Louis in the long history of swashbucklers. He was little different to his character in 'Titanic', talked in the same way, moved in the same way, and appeared to be thinking in the same way. Robert Redford's handsome sameness had an attractive quality. This sameness has none. It is dull in its shallow dourness. Nor has it gone further in 'Catch me if you Can'. Hollywood needs better acting from its young stars: good looks, though they may capture the hearts of schoolgirls for a while, do not make for enduring careers at the top without talent. James Dean had both but made the unfortunate career move of dying so we cannot judge a later career. Di Caprio, alas, does not. Put a stone on him, a few inches on his waistline, and his fans will disappear, if they haven't deserted in droves already.
On the one hand, Amsterdam bore too lightly the Orestian imperative to revenge his father, and on the other had no Shakespearian qualms of conscience. Rounded characters have doubts and conscience like real people, but then Scorsese is not Shakespeare, nor is he John Ford, who could give his great western characters a humanity and a depth fathoms deeper than any shown by Scorsese in this film.
Where's The Method in all this acting? Lee Strasberg would turn in his grave. What will they think of it all down at The Actor's Studio? Maybe they'll develop The New Method, of which lesson one would begin, 'Put on a phony and grimace fiercely.' This was not acting, it was performing. This was not film; it was pantomime.
It was also morality play with Day-Lewis as Satan, Di Caprio a type of Christ about his father's business, and Diaz as Mary Magdalen, with a supporting cast of predictable and grimacing devils of various shades of evil, for, unlike Dickens or Dostoyevsky, nothing good seemed to shine out in The Five Points.
Hollywood being what it is, there will be mutual backslapping with award after award, but when the scented smoke of self-congratulation clears, this will be seen as an inferior movie with much less in it than meets the eye. However, as the young man who runs my local DVD rental shop told me, 'It's Scorsese, so you have to see it!' Nicholas Dunne-Lynch 2004.