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GANGS OF NEW YORK
The large obsessive talents of director Martin Scorsese are turned loose on his favorite subject (New York), this time the immigrant Irish trying to survive amid mid 19th century poverty and hostility. The result is photogenic, exciting and disappointing. Gangs is not a documentary or docudrama, although historical figures wander through it and some social history is passed along.
We absorb Scorsese’s vision of the city then, especially in its immigrant heart, the Five Points area in lower Manhattan bursting with life and danger, sin and crime, controlled by terror and alliances among bellicose ethnic warlords.
Into this slum cauldron come the Irish, strangers in a strange land, despised and exploited as the latest, most desperate competitors for work and power. The story is basically a city set western. An Irish boy witnesses his father killed in battle by the obnoxious leader of the natives. The boy returns as an adult to gain revenge for himself and status for his people.
The spectacle and cinematics work the fires, the public hangings, the street battles, the enormous sets, the crowds, the saloons and music halls, the cruelty and, ultimately, the horrific draft riots of 1863 that devastated the city.
Add also a formidable villain. Daniel Day Lewis’s “Bill the Butcher” is intelligent and shrewd and a ruthless force of nature. As the hero, Leonardo DiCaprio is overmatched in both temperament and wit. More deeply, there is little sense of Irish culture or work or family life, or the faith that sustained them. Lots of sweep, blood and chaos, but minimal humanity; essentially a brilliantly staged combat film; satisfactory for adults.
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