A trail-blazing movie - hopefully, those that follow the trail will be still better

Rating: Null/10 (9 January 2003)

In 1846 New York City, the native gangs and the foreign (mostly Irish) gangs meet to fight an awful battle for supremacy. The natives are victorious and the Irish leader, Priest Vallon, is slain by the terrible Bill Cutting. Vallon's son, Amsterdam, is dispatched to an orphanage and emerges in 1862 to find most of his Irish fellows subjugated (but cared for) by Bill and his native gang. Amsterdam joins Bill's gang and begins to rise through the ranks.
The United States' stories of its own creation have almost invariably been Westerns. GANGS OF NEW YORK pioneers a needed new genre: the Eastern. Without the East, there would have been no conquest of the West. Some of the most famous figures in the history of the West were actually Easterners, such as a New York City boy named Henry McCarty who moved to Arizona and became known as Billy the Kid. As this movie demonstrates, the West had no monopoly on lawlessness and violence. The 19th century East also deserves its larger-than-life heroes and villains, and GANGS OF NEW YORK tries to fill that need.
The movie duly sets about creating the atmosphere and archetypes which will inhabit the land of the Eastern. If Westerns are stories of ranches and railroads, then Easterns will be stories of cities and ships. Just as the frontier landscape itself is a character in every Western, the city streets of New York itself live and breathe in this Eastern (kudos to Scorsese for shunning CGI sets in favor of real ones wherever possible). While the West is a place of vast empty spaces, home to the lonely Indian of Fraser's `The End of the Trail,' Scorsese's East is a teeming warren of pugnacious immigrant tribes stepping on each other's toes, with open warfare avoided only by a brutal pecking order where every man exacts his `due and proper' from the man below. Patrick Buchanan ought to see this movie depict how his own Irish Catholic forbears were treated with the same anti-immigrant prejudice that he now directs against modern-day newcomers to America.
Another important part of the Eastern atmosphere is the language - `stargazer,' `turtledove,' `blodgett,' `dustup' - that gives it a unique sense of time and place. Not even the characters themselves understand all the local argot; when a gangster calls Amsterdam a `fiddling ben,' Amsterdam replies that he might be insulted if he knew what the epithet meant. The soundtrack includes a number of enchanting songs; it is true that some are anachronistic and jarring, but even these are beautiful.
The outstanding creation of GANGS OF NEW YORK is its villain, Daniel Day Lewis's Bill Cutting, a butcher by trade who slaughters both pigs and human beings with unsentimental expertise. Lewis's performance ought to garner him an Oscar and will be the standard by which future Eastern villains are judged. Bill the Butcher is terrifying, sadistic, bigoted, and evil. He is also brave, strong, and capable of real caring for his underlings. He manifests genuine respect for his victim, Priest Vallon. In one scene, he artfully suggests that a corrupt policeman's reluctance to do his bidding is as hypocritical as a butcher crying over a slaughtered rabbit. Scorsese has certainly taken to heart Hitchcock's maxim that a movie can only be as good as its villain.
Unfortunately, GANGS OF NEW YORK is not quite as good as its villain, because it lacks a great hero to balance against him. Leonardo DiCaprio does his best, and it is surprising how far his acting and his goatee go to toughen up his pretty-boy persona. But Amsterdam is simply not a well-written protagonist. He is impenetrable and uncompelling. At the end of the movie, I understand no better why `the blood stays on the blade' than I did at the beginning. Those who have seen Michael Corleone's voyage from good to evil will find Amsterdam's tribulations tedious and trite by comparison.
Also unsatisfactory is the lady lead, Cameron Diaz' Jenny Everdeane. Jenny is even more inscrutable than Amsterdam. I could not understand what attracted her to Amsterdam, and evidently Amsterdam doesn't either. Again, this is not Diaz' fault; she acts what she is given superbly. She just isn't given much.
The supporting cast is great. Dominated by Lewis, it also features Jim Broadbent as Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed. I ended up liking the politician Tweed more than most of the characters in the movie; he is corrupt and has no nobler motive than to line his own pockets, but at least he does so chiefly by helping the immigrants, not by stamping them down as others do. Other standouts are Liam Neeson as Amsterdam's father and Brendan Gleeson as Monk McGinn.
Perhaps the uninspired presentation of Amsterdam and Jenny, contrasted with the powerful portrayal of Bill, reflects an overall problem with American cinema: we have become fascinated with evil, and regard goodness as dull. This does not have to be so. (See LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL for a man who is good and who is also fascinating and delightful to watch). Here is where Scorsese's Eastern has not yet matched the Western. Westerns deal with ranchers raising cattle, cowboys driving them, laborers building railroads, sodbusters growing their crops, lawmen chasing down bank robbers; in short, people making the West a better place than they found it. If the criminals in GANGS OF NEW YORK had anything to do with changing America from a fledgling colony into a superpower, Scorsese doesn't show it to us.
Scorsese presents us with a grand setting, populated by wonderful characters, on which little takes place besides senseless violence. The movie is good, but I don't think many people will mistake it for great. Still, GANGS OF NEW YORK has launched the Eastern, and that is an important accomplishment. Better plays will someday be performed on the stage that Scorsese has built here.
Rating: *** out of ****.
Recommendation: See it in the theater if you have a strong stomach for violence.