Despite its faults, a remarkable film with an epic sense of history

Rating: 7/10 (27 April 2007)

The title "Gangs of New York" might lead one to expect yet another film about the Mafia or a cops-and-robbers drama. (An obscure crime drama of the same name was released in 1938). Scorsese, however, is not revisiting the territory explored in "Mean Streets" or "Goodfellas". Rather, this is a look at the nineteenth century roots of organised crime in America.
The action (apart from an opening scene set in 1846) is set during the American Civil War. The "gangs" of the title are the various criminal groups battling for control of the New York underworld. The film concentrates on two gangs based in the Five Points slum district, the oddly-named Dead Rabbits and the Confederation of American Natives. The former group is made up of recent Irish Catholic immigrants; the latter of Americans of British descent (not Native Americans in the modern sense). Despite their own immigrant background, the Natives detest all more recent arrivals, especially the Irish whose Catholic religion they despise.
The two main characters are William Cutting, ("Bill the Butcher") the thuggish leader of the Natives, and a mysterious young man named Amsterdam Vallon, who joins his gang. Sixteen years earlier, Vallon's father, the leader of the Dead Rabbits, was killed by Bill in a battle between the two gangs, and Vallon wants revenge. (Bill has no idea who the young man is). To complicate matters further, the two share a mistress, the beautiful female pickpocket Jenny Everdeane.
Intertwined with the fictional story of Bill and Vallon is the real historical story of the New York Draft Riots of July 1863. These started as a protest against conscription into the Union Army, but quickly took on both racial and class overtones when the mob started attacking the homes of the rich and lynching Negroes. Most of the rioters were immigrants who were happy to make a new life in America but less happy to serve in her armed forces. Blacks were resented because the war was being fought to liberate them from slavery, and the rich because this was seen as a "poor man's fight in a rich man's war". Particularly unpopular was a clause which enabled wealthy citizens to avoid conscription on payment of $300 to the Government.
The film is remarkably cynical about American public life in this period. Official history might teach that the Civil War was a noble crusade against slavery and that nineteenth-century America was a beacon of liberty to oppressed Europeans living under autocratic regimes. The history we see here, however, is the unofficial version. Elections are bought and sold as a result of shady back-room deals. The police are as corrupt as their political masters, and have little interest in protecting the public. (They make no attempt to intervene in the fight in which Vallon's father is killed). The city's rival fire-brigades would rather fight one another than put out fires. Opposition to the war effort was common, and not confined to a few Copperhead politicians. Although Scorsese shows the irrational violence of which the mob are capable, we also sense that he has some sympathy with the complaints of the poor that, in what is nominally a democracy, their voice is not being listened to and that they have no alternative but to riot. (Ironically, however, this anti-war riot may actually have lengthened the war by persuading Southerners to keep fighting, even after Gettysburg, in the belief that the North was tearing itself apart). The depiction of the riots with which the film ends is one of its two great set-pieces, the other being the battle scene between the Dead Rabbits and the Natives with which it begins.
The dark side of mid-nineteenth century London is well-known to us from the novels of Dickens and their many film and television adaptations. The underside of New York in this period is perhaps less familiar in popular culture, but Scorsese brings it to life here in all its Dickensian squalor and vitality (with the aid of a massive set in Italy's Cinecitta)- its bars, its brothels, its sleazy music-halls. Daniel Day Lewis's Bill, a monstrously sadistic one-eyed villain, who is occasionally capable of touches of chivalry, is a particularly Dickensian figure. He is said to be based on a real-life character named Bill Poole, but I wondered if Bill Sykes from "Oliver Twist" might also have been an influence. (Similarly, Jenny has something in common with Dickens's Nancy). The other memorable performance is from Jim Broadbent as another real-life character, the corrupt political fixer William "Boss" Tweed.
There are a few weaknesses. Cameron Diaz is never very convincing as Jenny. In a fine example of stereotyping by hair colour, the normally blonde Diaz is forced to don a red wig, presumably to satisfy those Americans who firmly believe that all Irishwomen are redheads. (Similarly, another blonde, Michelle Pfeiffer, had to become a brunette in "Married to the Mob", in order to placate those who refuse to believe in the existence of blonde Italian-Americans). Leonardo Di Caprio is rather weak as Vallon, and suffers by comparison with some of the other actors, particularly Day Lewis. The two strands to the story, the personal and the political, are never particularly well integrated. The action becomes confused at times and the film could have used some judicious cutting. There are some historical inaccuracies; the Union Navy, for example, did not bombard the city during the riots as shown here.
Nevertheless, for all its faults, this is still in many ways a remarkable film. Day Lewis and Broadbent are brilliant, and the two great set pieces are superbly handled. Scorsese brings to his film a vigour, an imagination and an epic sense of history that are all too often lacking in modern film-making with its remakes, its sequels and its formulaic movies-by-numbers. 7/10