Resembling a colossal gaffe of equal parts James Cameron imitating Martin Scorsese, Michael Bay imitating the same, and the Raging Bull himself pulling an impudent number in the Oliver Stone vein, masquerading as Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York heralds the Academy Awards first coup d’état on the director’s usually stunning grasp of cinema aesthetics. That said, the film is an immense disappointment, the kind that underlines its blow and wake with novel trivia pertaining to its heated set, re-shoots, a ballooned budget, and a continually delayed release date. A sort of teen-beat-skewed regurgitation of gamely-named pirates, pop culture, and high school history lessons, this peculiar amalgam is Spielberg frustrated emotionalism without the violence-restrained and Bay with substantial style. That it was so disappointing is puzzling in itself, but that it is already being greeted with praise and accolades warrants further head-scratching.
Contemptible ostentation and Scorsese’s redundant cavalcade of camera virtuosity sparks animation in Gang of New York’s frequently outmoded displays of rigid histrionics and scattershot plotting. By the film’s middle second, at which the end appears near yet never comes, there seems a stale aura of familiarity when a scruffy Leo DiCaprio outcast withdraws from gangland society to embody Martin Sheen’s Col. Benjamin Williard and the same hermitic psychotic from the problematic post-Titanic The Beach. Our protagonist emerges bitter and the film in a likewise manner, impossibly ethnocentric and xenophobic, but then again that’s the point. Flawed with a depiction of depravity as its focal point would be forgivable but superfluous and needlessly elongated is Scorsese’s approach here, kneeling only to the epic status requirement for Oscar criteria.
With what seems to be a chilling fulfillment of the Oscar prerequisites becomes a disheartening premonition of a great fallen filmmaking master; leaving an open-endedness with his creativity in full gear, his sense of discernment questionable. Apparently Scorsese is rather bitter about having never won the coveted golden statuette and consequently his latest picture dearly suffers under what seems to be fits of (hopefully) temporary insanity and absurd means of self-aggrandizing. This gaudy accruement of some thirty years of passion dispels the subtly poignant (The Last Temptation of Christ) and conventionally romantic structures (Goodfellas, Casino) of his past labors of loves, reaping only the blood thirst of the source and not much of its respective heart. The adjacent purpose of its source (a Herbert Ashbury novel) exhibits an informative but literal interpretation of educational mediums and near-ridiculousness, most notable in montages too obviously traced to a history class video. Though much of these aspects’ intended portrayals lack equipoise and development, eventually yielding purpose to another Scorsese editing gimmick, they’re slightly enlightening.
Circa 1846 in New York’s decaying Five Points district Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) courageously (?) leads a large, rag-tag band of Irish immigrants called “The Dead Rabbits” in a bloogy gangland fight against a mob of American-soil born so-called natives, led by vicious sexy beast Bill Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) AKA “The Butcher.” Bill kills Vallon in the fury but has so much respect for the brave leader that he later sees to a plaque memorial in his frequented pub. The Priest’s son, Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio, good if nondescript), witnesses the massacre as a boy and returns to the scene in 1863 after years of reckless abandon and meditation, itching to avenge his father. Streetwise gal/con woman called Jennie (Cameron Diaz) becomes Amsterdam’s redemption as he infiltrates Bill’s gang to become a trusted minion and thus consequent chaos erupts, amid the Civil War Draft Riots.
If Gangs of New York deserves any of the proposed prizes they will surely be awarded to Day-Lewis, whose incontrovertibly strict method acting sears the scenes and steals the entire show with a frightening brutality. The rest of the epic is a rousing, belligerent exercise in the adventuring commonplace of the 1800s and confused surrogate relations, its artificiality exemplified in the rather ridiculous costuming choice of dressing the gang members in color uniform so as to better identify who’s good and who’s evil in battle. Scorsese’s once prolific visionary work of imaginative set-pieces and camera work has been narrowed to overblown audacity in masturbatory theatrics and story convolution.
However tortuously obscure the plot evolves into, the end result bogs down to the same simplicity of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, minus that film’s subtlety and reflection, and add stock religious complication. A masterwork of the visceral riot but juvenile in its malcontent approach, Scorsese manages to exude minute thrills and other such primal evocations, mainly achieved through Day-Lewis. But ineffectually deficient in its feeling, message and pedestrian sadism that the appropriate self-reflection and self-loathing in the completed hero’s journey never seems discussed. The timidity of the cerebral process seems most evident in its self-proclamation that Gangs of New York is (overrated) James Cameron-esque fare and that we need the old Scorsese back.