A watchable offering that wanders too much

Rating: 7/10 (27 July 2003)

I confess embarrassment that I had not seen this film until it came out on video. Having a 2 year old can present obstacles to seeing a film so pervasively violent in the theater.
Thus, fresh from the DVD viewing, three things come immediately to mind:
1. I am really glad I could pause this and go to the bathroom. I may not have gone back into the theater if I'd purchased a large soda and found myself unable to stay until the end.
2. A budget this big, and this many huge names on both sides of the camera, have made a beautiful and epic movie that loses its way in the story and would never have been greenlighted with a first time director.
3. The fact that this part of American history has been swept under the rug for most publicly-educated citizens makes it hard to follow and even harder to swallow.
Regarding the first point - "epic" can mean sweeping and engaging, or it can be a polite way of saying "really frigging long". Kind of like a one-bedroom, half-bath beach house is "cozy" or "charming". Off the top of my head, I can map out perhaps 15 real story beats, but a great deal of superfluous environment creation is going on that makes the film 3 hours long. I was so unclear as to the protagonist's intentions during the second act of the film, I had no idea when or if we were going to get to the end. And when we did, it wasn't in the environment I expected, and the payoff was diluted. If this were based on a true story, I'd accept it, but the fictional characters were developed inside the structure of history, so there's no reason why we couldn't get the kind of ending the buildup seemed to promise.
Regarding the second point - I think Scorcese was really allowed to run with this. I know there are rumors that huge parts of the film were cut out, but if that's the case, the fault lies with the director for not cutting the right things. He seems enamored of the period in history - as I would probably be if I had researched it extensively - but the development of characters suffers for it. We are left to draw our own conclusions about what should be carrying the plot: the people we are offered as our points of view.
Regarding the third point - I have no idea how to solve this issue. It's not a movie about a single rarely-discussed battle in a war we all know about tangentially. It's a movie about (a) religiously-divided gangs in 19th century New York City, (b) fierce nationalism in a newly formed country ,(c) the political and social implications of a draft in a society of newly-arrived immigrants, and (d) a revenge tale carried out across generations between two men impacted by points a-c above. If this had not been Scorcese, and if he had not gotten DiCaprio and Day-Lewis and Diaz, this film would never have gotten off the ground. It could have used some pruning before it did.
With all of those complaints out of the way, I still gave this movie a 7 (and this is high for me - I rarely award 9's; only three 10's are in my entire IMDb voting history). The costuming and set design are fascinating. The battle scenes are bloody, and they might seem over the top, but I suspect that's what it looked like when people hacked each other to death using large handheld implements. The acting is stellar in some cases (Day-Lewis is great, although not as astounding as I expected from the reviews) and passable in others (DiCaprio has relatively little to do, given the fact that I don't feel his character develops, but he's good at what he's doing). I can't comment on Diaz's performance because it feels as though her character's entire arc was cut out of the film, leaving only a series of random actions that don't seem consistent. I think I give it this rating because it did eventually get around to closure, and it showed tremendous attention to detail. I just didn't like how it got there, and I wondered if some of the detail clouded the overall point.
Story is king in great movies. "Gangs" is good, but not great.
7/10