Cinema
Gangs Of New York (15, selected cinemas from 10 January)
Triangular cliché fest
Mark Steyn
Iso wanted to like Gangs Of New York, which is why I'm reviewing it a week early: I couldn't wait. It's based on a justly legendary book, Herbert Asbury's 1928 tour de force of the same name, a panorama of the New York underworld from the 1830s to the 1920s. You read it and think. 'There's gotta be a movie in here somewhere.' That's evidently what happened to Martin Scorsese. He read the book 30 years ago and he's been mulling it over ever since. He mulled too long.
The director's initial choices were good ones. For the prologue, he picked a notorious gang showdown at the Five Points on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1846. For the rest of the movie, he zoomed in on the year leading up to the famous Civil War draft riots that convulsed the city in 1863. It's in how he connects the two that things start to fall apart.
The opening is riveting: in a torch-lit catacomb, warriors prepare for battle, their dress and ritual and weaponry a weird blend of the modern and mediaeval, as goofy as anything in The Two Towers. Lots of leather, axes, cudgels, bats. Who are they? Where are they? Boom! The door is kicked open, and they tumble out on the streets, a crummy intersection in Lower Manhattan that looks like a run-down 18th
century colonial settlement — detached wood-frame structures, pigs at the trough. The fight begins: 'Natives' vs Irish immigrants. It's a winter morning, and the snow is soon streaked with blood. The head Mick is Liam Neeson playing a guy called Priest with a thick brogue and a dog collar. The lead native is Daniel Day-Lewis, talking in a prototype Noo Yawk accent, twirling his moustaches like Snidely Whiplash, and tapping on his glass eye with its attractive American eagle eyeball. This is Bill The Butcher' Cutting. He kills Priest in front of the Irishman's young son. The son runs away, grows up into Leonardo DiCaprio, and the movie turns into a big heap of nothing.
You know this story backwards, though Scorsese tells it forwards and takes just shy of three hours to do so. It's the old revenge meller: son returns to avenge father's death; unaware of the kid's identity, the big-time murderer takes him into the organisation, makes him a valued sidekick, then discovers the truth. Oh, and there's a girl. You've seen it a thousand times. Is this really the best Scorsese and his numerous writers can do? They take a singular, distinctive book, and in shaping the material can come up with nothing better than a triangular cliché fest you could write in your sleep? Apparently so.
In fairness to the director, he's done his research and he enjoys wedging it in. The pre-Guys And Dolls dialogue is presented to us as deliberately and precisely as a Berlitz language tape: 'She is a prim-looking stargazer,' says Leo on spotting Cameron Diaz, the girl. He subsequently explains to us that Miss Diaz likes to go uptown, slip into swank Fifth Avenue mansions disguised as a maid, and clean the joint out. Practitioners of this specialised form of burglary, he tells us, are known as 'turtledoves'. Fascinating.
But Scorsese can't connect the ornate, meandering byways of his research to the main plot, so, after this entertaining diversion, Cameron the turtledove just goes back to being Cameron the girl, an undernourished, underwritten bus-and-truck version of Nancy from Oliver! She doesn't sing 'As Long As He Needs Me', though it would help if she did, given that we've got three hours to fill, and that's longer than any of us need these characters.
DiCaprio, meanwhile, is dull. Except for one bit of roguish twinkly byplay with Miss Diaz, there's no light and shade to the performance: this is his serious role and it's no laughing matter. Day-Lewis, in toppers and waistcoats and soaked in blood, has the extravagant measure of the project, but he's given very little support by those around him.
It's tempting to assume that DiCaprio and Diaz are so boring because Scorsese's preoccupied by the real-life figures they're mingling with — Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, Archbishop Hughes, Horace Greeley — and the great issues of the day — slavery, conscription, immigration. But it soon becomes clear that the director's got nothing to say about the bigger picture, either. The plot's climax is set against the background of the 1863 draft riots, a bloody spasm that's long faded from the city's collective memory, in part perhaps through shame: more blacks were killed that week in New York than in any other event in American history. By the time Scorsese gets to the riots, he's pretty much given up on his lame-a plot and the background — the riot — is all there is. The trouble is, he has no point of view on the material — or, rather, he's deliberately chosen to dodge the question. The riot just sort of happens, and spreads, like a disease or a meteorological disaster. The director is broadly pro-immigrant, pro-poor people, but, in this case, as he surely must know after all that research, the poor people, the immigrants, the draft dodgers happened to be pro-slavery, pro-lynching, anti-Negro and anti-American. Yes, it's a shame the treasonous racists got gunned down by the soldiers, but it's difficult to understand the mindset of a director who yearns to film this incident for his entire adult life and then goes to inordinate lengths to obliterate the context of it.
What a waste. Scorsese is never short of memorable images: there's one beautiful sequence linking today's New York with the Butcher's battleground — though, even as you admire it, you know the director's thesis — that these bloodsoaked thugs are somehow America's real Founding Fathers — is a lot of baloney. The Five Points was the worst slum on the continent, and the backwardness of New York politics generally was irrelevant to political evolution elsewhere. But it somehow encapsulates the limitations of Scorsese's genius that one can enjoy the visuals even while recognising it's bunk. Even the many good reviews he's had in America sidle up to saying as much. They're polite to the great man. The preferred word is 'flawed', which is traditionally followed by 'masterpiece', though this time round no one can quite bring themselves to use the word. I think it's a little more than 'flawed'; I'd say it's the worst Scorsese film since New York, New York. I doubt the Best Director Oscar rumours will come to anything, though the visual design is spectacular and deserves an award. The real victim here is Herbert Asbury.
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