The earth turns but we don't feel it move

Rating: 9/10 (22 October 2004)

When I hear people talk about how America is the greatest country in the world, which is increasingly common from all political standpoints as we approach the 2004 election, it has always struck me how staggeringly wrong that statement is (at least since I traveled in Europe and learned firsthand about other countries). I'm sure I've already angered plenty of the few Americans who may read this review, so I should clarify. America really is a great country, I've lived here for my entire life and plan to live here for the rest of it, but it is simply not the greatest country in the world. That is, in fact, the summation in a single sentence of the common arrogance for which so much of the rest of the world looks at us with disdain.
America is not the greatest, but A GREAT country, in a world with MANY OTHER great countries.
Martin Scorsese, in keeping with his expanding collection of startlingly realistic gangster movies, has taken the best step that he could possibly have taken at this point in his career, in my opinion. He has gone into the 19th Century to make a film about the origins of the very genre that he knows so well to finally make a film that he had wanted to make for more than two decades. The first thing that struck me about Gangs of New York was the stunningly impressive re-creation of mid-19th Century New York. You can almost smell the horses and dirty people, the gunpowder, the wide-eyed immigrants as they step out of the immigration ship and onto the military to go out and fight for 'their country.' The film immediately makes a harsh criticism of the American tendency toward military violence. Immigrants are shown one document that makes them citizens and another that enlists them in the army, and they are armed and sent to war before they even understand what is happening.
The issue of gangs comes up in regards to America as a nation as well as the gangs rivaling each other within the cities. Many people compare current American military action as all too similar to the reaction of an inner city gang  You hit me, we hit you  and Scorsese shows that this is not new at all, it used to be even a desired impression. At one point a character notes, 'True Americans call themselves a gang, but all they do is stand around damning England.' Odd that England should now be our #1 ally in a massively controversial war.
It's important to note that the movie is not entirely about the gangs of New York, but sort of a gang mentality that seems to have been disturbingly prevalent since the earliest days of the nation. Criminal gangs run the streets, corrupt politicians meet in smoky rooms to create laws and regulations that make them huge amounts of money and are promptly ignored by the common people, and the government itself bullies immigrants and the poor into the military. Enlist in the military and you go off to fight for a country that you don't even know and only have begun to belong to, but you get paid. Don't enlist, and they'll draft you, and if you get drafted you get no pay. Needless to say, the draft didn't have a lot of fans.
That's a serious gamble for someone to take when facing such a monumental struggle as entering another country and hoping to scrape out a living at the same time. It's like playing the lottery with your life. It is indeed an unsettling scene to see bewildered immigrants boarding a ship as coffins are unloaded above them. Although for natives and immigrants alike, a mere $300, a massive amount of money at the time, could buy your 'freedom' from military service. This is another thing that has not changed much to this day. And notice what happens when the poor are forced into military service and the rich buy their way out! Riots!!
There are surprising things brought up in the film as well, such as the widespread disgust at Lincoln's having freed the slaves, which today stands as one of the great moments in American history, but the greatest thing that the movie does is show the roots of much of today's unrest in America. The gangs run rampant in the streets, unhindered by such trivialities as the police forces, which are too busy fighting each other to perform much enforcement of the law. Even fire departments fight each other. As is noted early on in the film, New York was not a city, it was more like a furnace.
The movie focuses on the life of Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose father, Priest Vallon, played by Liam Neeson, is killed in a gangland massacre at the start of the film. The respect that gangsters had for each other is shown when Bill 'the Butcher' Cutting, the rival gangster (and a staggering performance by Daniel Day-Lewis), protects his body from the post-mortem assaults of his men, asks that his son gets a good education, and even keeps a portrait of him until almost two decades later when he and Amsterdam's fates bring them together again.
Cutting is quickly established as a vicious and cruel gangster, but whose chinks are ultimately exposed, although very subtly, because as his largest weapon, like so many dictators today, is fear. He relies on committing fearsome acts in order to preserve the order of things, to keep people afraid and therefore keep himself in a position of power. The knife-throwing scene, for example, is VERY good.
It's interesting to see the young New York split by gangs at every level of society, each side claiming their own territory, each side praying to the same God, convinced that God is on their side. At the end of the film there is a heavy lesson to be learned. Vallon and Cutting find themselves laying side-by-side in the street, each badly wounded, and even Cutting, the malicious fear-monger, looks around at the chaos in the street, seemingly shamed to see what he had helped create. 'Friend or foe, didn't make no difference now.'
It really makes you think about living your life by the way of the gun when the gravestones start to show up at the end of the film, and then the skyscrapers show up around those. Vallon and Cutting had each created positions of power and influence in New York, but after their violence erupted and destroyed their spheres of influence, 'they build the city back up, and for the rest of time, it's like no one ever knew we was here.'