A depressing experience

Rating: Null/10 (16 January 2003)

I can't get over the fact that Martin Scorsese, whom I regard as one of this generation's most talented directors, could have made such a lousy film. But it's not just lousy ; this savage, brutal, incoherent piece of crap is also profoundly disturbing.
The story revolves around two characters in 1840's New York. On the one hand there's Leonardo De Caprio as the young Irishman who sees his improbably gallant father slain in a street fight and spends the next 16 years - and believe me, it *feels* like sixteen years - plotting revenge. Leonardo, pretty as ever, is thoroughly unconvincing as a tough guy ; he spends most of the film either getting beaten, slashed, burned and otherwise thoroughly trounced, or else whining and blubbering about it. When he attempts to look menacing, all he manages to do is curl his upper lip in a kind of sneer with which, one imagines, he is wont to insult waiters in overpriced Beverly Hills restaurants.
The real star of the film is Daniel Day Lewis, as The Butcher, leader of the "Natives", a gang of "native-born Americans" whose main characteristic is that they hate the Irish, the "Niggers" and the "Chinks". Day Lewis swaggers his way through sets designed to represent mid-19th century New York, brutalizing the helpless, terrorizing abject and caricatural politicians, eliminating his opponents by hurling meat-cleavers at them when their backs are turned, and torturing Di Caprio in a brutal central scene which is clearly revelatory of a very sick mind indeed.
On the historical level the film might be almost amusing. One never for an instant believes any of this, nor believes one is anywhere but a very expensive, computer-enhanced Hollywood set. The supposed Irishmen prance about like monstrously overgrown leprechauns, and the "historical" portrayals of warfare between gangs, police, troops and foreman are about as credible as a Keystone Kops routine, only a lot less funny. It's hard to tell which is more depressing, Di Caprio's phoney Irish brogue or Day Lewis' bargain-basement Archie-Bunker accent ("youse guys"). The film, as I said, belongs to Day-Lewis, who gives a skillful albeit way-over-the-top performance. But the problem is that we are clearly supposed to like and admire this psychotic, sadistic, xenophobic, racist bully, as even the Di Caprio character does ; indeed the film is full of the rival gang-leaders' pathologically intense homoerotic attraction towards one another. Presumably this macho touchy-feeliness is what makes the characters admirable in Scorsese's eyes. There is precisely one female speaking role amid the cast of hundreds ; the few other women in the film are whores or - another indication of the film's historical plausibility - axe-swinging street fighters.
Yet at the end of it all, when we have witnessed buckets of blood and brutality, when we've watched mobs lynch black men and set them on fire, when we've seen anti-draft rioters, who clearly have Scorsese's sympathy, lay waste to "Nigger" boarding-houses, because, in words of Di Caprio's sententious voice-over, the poor don't give a damn about the fight against slavery ; we begin to get a glimpse of what Scorsese is really on about here. As this tedious and brutal film lumbers on towards its predictable conclusion, we realize that for Scorsese these savage, sadistic, racist thugs are admirable ; they are, in a sense I'm unable to understand, the ones who "built America", although by the time Di Caprio as narrator tells us this, they have already spent three hours tearing down everything in sight. We are supposed, I guess, to weep, when the cowardly Union troops mow these "heroes" down, thereby preventing them from lynching more "Niggers". I personally found myself wanting to see the entire team responsible for this atrocity of a film, with Scorsese first and foremost among them, placed squarely in their sights.
Is there any sociological or world-historical significance to this paean to stupidity, cruelty and violence? Together with similarly brutal recent films like Gaspar Noe's _Irreversible_, will it be used by future cultural historians to study just how sick contemporary Western society was at the beginning of the third millennium ? I leave these questions to future pundits. One thing seems certain about this film, and this makes me sad : it marks the definitive fall from grace of a very good director, whom I, for one, can never again respect.