Technical Virtousity

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2003)

Dante Ferretti's overwhelmingly detailed production design (with set decoration by Francesca LoSchiavo and costume design by Sandy Powell) and Michael Ballhaus' masterful tracking camerawork helps push Martin Scorsese's passionate revisionist history of gang wars between Irish immigrants and Americans into greatness. It's one of the few times (his minor period piece `The Age Of Innocence' is another) where Scorsese has relied so heavily on sets and costuming to advance his New York themes (here it's about the city's amalgamation) and it's also one of his most commercial efforts to date: with its big names (Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis and Cameron Diaz) and familiar plot (it's another story of revenge) to attract a mass audience, Scorsese tones down the graphic nature of the tale; while there's plenty of bloodshed, it's far less shocking than the knife-in-the-hand images of `Taxi Driver' and living burial in `Casino'. The story is by Jay Cocks, but the script seems pieced together with individual contributions from Cocks, Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan and while it does at times meander from incident to incident, it never bores over the course of one hundred and sixty-eight minutes because the violent tension that keeps mounting is mixed with the characters' poverty-stricken despair and the effect, while it comes close, doesn't desensitize you. The performances by the principals are excellent (DiCaprio has an unreadable look in his eyes and makes a great mythic hero and Diaz does well in a role that's underwritten yet touching); and in fact the film's best moment is a quiet conversation in which Day-Lewis describes to DiCaprio his respect for his enemy/counterpart, the noble warrior (DiCaprio's late father, played in the opening section by Liam Neeson). Day-Lewis' penchant for overacting here serves him well; his misguided isolationist anger is balanced by his respect for the rules of combat and he seems to be as concerned with his character's philosophical motivations as much as the violent ones. Scorsese has never overly politicized but he does here and while his sympathies towards the newcomers is obvious and a bit cloying, the indignation he feels about how these peoples were used, relegated to the periphery and then discarded while laying the foundation of today's New York seems a reasonable, justified response. At this point in his career, Scorsese seems to believe he has to make an epic statement about his town and country to give value to his career--he needn't; his body of work speaks for itself--but while this may not be the crowning achievement he wants it to be, its' technical virtuosity makes it quite an impressive achievement in a class by itself.