2002 / 168 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

I’d be lying if I were to tell you that “Gangs of New York” was anything less than stunning, that it was anything short of a mesmerizing document of a time period little has been told about. It is rich in character, setting, mood and plot. If anything, it’s a little too rich for its own good.

“Gangs of New York” is the story of, surprise-surprise, New York City in the middle of the 1800’s. It was a time in which street gangs fought each other for dominance. Not only the dominance of their own gang, but for the dominance of their culture, their religion, their way of life, and, of course, for money. Into this maelstrom comes a young man named Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving another fine performance this year). Amsterdam has returned to the city from a long stint in Helltown Correctional Facility for Boys, and he has returned with a single thing upon his mind: revenge. His father was killed in a spectacular battle with the man who now basically runs things in the shady Five Points district of New York: Bill “The Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis, in the performance of the year). Bill the Butcher is a man true to his name. A man who carries more knives on his person than you can buy on an average night watching the Home Shopping Network. Bill controls pretty much everything in Five Points, mainly because he is too vicious for anyone to want to mess with. Amsterdam ingratiates himself to Bill and is taken under his wing. And here is where the situation gets sticky. He comes to respect Bill, on Bill’s own terms, maybe even to like him. But he still has a duty to his dead father, does he not?

“Gangs of New York” doesn’t really have what I would call a “good guy”. Sure, Leo is a good enough sort and even organizes a sort of revolution at one point. But he also allies himself with the very devil who killed his father, and is a big part in helping the man orchestrate his schemes. He resents the men who once ran with his father and now run with Bill, but one cannot help but see the ironic hypocrisy in this. He is, after all, doing the very same thing himself, if only to better bring the Butcher down. “Gangs” is filled with many such moral quagmires and murky dilemmas. It is also ran through with the scent of blood and carnage. It vividly emphasizes a time in which New York was not so much a city as “a furnace in which a city might someday be forged”.

Martin Scorsese has a lot to say in this film, which is to be expected. It has, after all, taken him at least two decades to bring this epic to life. He has all the dialogue in the right place. All of the expressions and colloquialisms seem spot on. So does the anger and rage of a city in which immigrants and native-born fight for respect and dominance. It’s a complex and fascinating tale that is well-written and well-acted. And yet, by the end, there are so many things going on that the film seems overstuffed. There are rumbles and race riots and political statements. There is a love story and a revenge story and the story of a city coming into its own, and all of them, like the people in the film itself, seem to be struggling for dominance, clamoring over one another to be noticed. This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie; far from it. But, as with “Casino”, only to a much better extent, it makes the film feel far too busy. I admire Scorsese’s ambition and I certainly love the scope of his story. But it has a way of making the more personal moments feel a little out of place and unnecessary. As fascinating as the relationship between Amsterdam and Cameron Diaz’s charming pickpocket character is, one cannot help but long for more of the things that actually happened. Not a second of Bill the Butcher’s screen time feels unnecessary, however. Daniel Day Lewis delivers a blistering and overwhelming performance. His performance is so good, in fact, that it’s nearly detrimental to the rest of the film. He blows all the other actors off the screen with his rage and his determination. He is a truly complex and brutal character, the sort of man that could only have lived and dominated in this sort of time period, and Lewis hits all the right notes and then some. It’s a towering spectacle, much like the rest of the film.

Scorsese may not have made a perfect film here. But he made such a damn good one that all of my petty complaints seem trivial. Despite my own small qualms, it’s a film that demands to be seen, and one which entertains and enlightens as few of this year’s films have.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 20th, 2002 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.