An epic disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (16 December 2002)

Just returned from a Writer's Guild screening of "Gangs of New
York," and the news is not good. The movie certainly has its nice
moments (I would hope so -- at close to three hours you should
stumble on good moments every once in a while) but overall, it
simply does not work. It fails as entertainment.
Chief among the problems is the movie's pedantic approach to its
subject. "Gangs" comes off like the history lecture you fell asleep
in in college. There are long sequences that attempt to give the
bigger picture of the social struggles in Civil War-era New York.
Each of these sequences is accompanied by on-the-nose voiceover that tells us nothing more than what we are seeing.
There's no dramatic core to it. Granted -- this is an under-reported
era in our nation's history, when ideas of patriotism and civic duty
clashed with the reality that the country was built on the backs of
immigrants. But for God's sake, if you're going to teach history,
make a documentary.
Scorcese (and Pileggi) used voiceover to virtuoso effect in
"Goodfellas." But that voiceover had its own idiom, the language of
the streets that Scorcese loves so well. And it had a point of view:
Henry Hill's narration crackled with the energy of a man falling in
love with crime. DiCaprio's voiceover is as deadly dull as a
Sunday School lecture. And what's worse, he loses his accent half
the time. On top of it, the words themselves simply report the
action, or, lacking drama, become too flowery. The screenwriters
strain to create emotion when none is there.
At the WGA screening, two of the screenwriters attested that
Scorcese hired a third, Ken Lonergan, to add the voiceover after
everything else had been written. I have no idea why this was
done. It's completely superfluous and it hurts the movie.
On to the acting. I'm afraid the news doesn't get much better.

Everyone is falling over themselves saying how great Daniel Day
Lewis was. Take a step back, people. Lewis certainly has
charisma to spare. But half the time he seems to be doing a bad
Deniro impression. His scenery-chewing gets more and more
over the top as the movie goes on. This performance is about on
par with Tim Roth's performance in "Rob Roy." What? You say
you don't remember that? Exactly.
Cameron Diaz looks ridiculously out of place in this movie. I'm
sorry to say it, because I love her work, and she normally makes
smart choices. Not this time. I just don't buy her as a whoring
orphan pickpocket. She tries very hard, and she even brings
humor and spark to the role. But come on! You can't have it both
ways! You can't tell us how rough and tumble the streets of New
York were in 1860, and then show us Cameron Diaz as a pickpocket, looking like she just finished a revlon commercial!
People will be put off by the violence. Some will be horrified by it. I
don't mind the violence. I just didn't care about it at all. It was all
so predictable and pat. There were SO many characters, and SO
MANY get killed, that in the end you didn't feel that much for any
one of them.
Which brings me to my final beef. LESS IS MORE. Less, Marty, is
MORE. This movie was three hours long because it is trying to
trick people into thinking it is "Epic" and "Artsy." In other words,
they're hoping it will be nominated for Best Picture before anyone
can figure out that it isn't any good. And it just may work. But if the
movie had been trimmed down by about an hour (removing the
last forty minutes would have helped), it would have benefitted
greatly. As long as the story focused on the main three characters,
it at least worked as melodrama. When it tried to bring in the
bigger, sprawling historical context, it became muddled, tiresome
and completely without drama.
I'm not taking anything away from Martin Scorcese. Even the great
ones miss once in a while. But don't see this movie unless you've
got a lot of time and you can forgive a lot of faults.