| It’s no wonder that Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein decided to delay the release of director Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York after 9/11.
Forget about the claims of "cultural sensitivity" that the honcho offered as a reason for the delay last year – Weinstein is hardly known for his sensitivity, except maybe where making money is concerned. But he is savvy, and he obviously could see how unpopular the film would have been in the U.S. last winter.
Why? Well, the basis of Scorsese’s latest picture is that America is a nation founded on racism, hatred, violence and the emotion that fuels them all – fear.
These are hardly new ideas, particularly for Scorsese, who has taken a dim view of American patriotism in movies like Goodfellas and Casino among others, but they’re particularly fitting in a film about the gangs that held sway over the Five Points area of New York in the mid-1800s. Taking Herbert Asbury’s fascinating social history of the same name as a rough template for the script, writers Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count On Me), Stephen Zaillian (Schindler’s List) and Jay Cocks (The Age of Innocence) have spun it into a parable for Americans trying to cope in what are often referred to as "these dark times."
At the film’s centre is the cruel xenophobic underworld overlord Bill Cutting, a.k.a. "the Butcher," an anti-hero played with verve by Daniel Day-Lewis. The Butcher leads a gang of so-called "Native Americans," anti-Unionist Anglo-Saxons who have been born on the fledgling nation’s terra nova, and who, if they had their way, would keep immigrants out of the country and blacks enslaved.
In opposition to the Native Americans are the Irish gangs, and Leonardo DiCaprio plays one of their members, Amsterdam Vallon – a young man sworn to avenge the death of his father at The Butcher’s hand several years earlier.
This revenge story, and the love story between Vallon and Jenny (a prostitute and pickpocket played by Cameron Diaz), are pretty standard stuff. The plot becomes a lot more interesting when Vallon is taken, as he says, "under the dragon’s wing" and The Butcher makes him his apprentice. Nevertheless, narrative dynamics take a back seat to character and theme.
That’s fine, though, because Scorsese is painting in broad strokes with this film, and its historical elisions and composite characters are to be expected in any epic of this sort. Gangs of New York is at its best when it is peeling back the layers of history and revealing how a particularly volatile period around the time of the Civil War shaped the United States – including all the tribalism, political corruption and paranoia that the nation is still dealing with today.
One can’t help but draw parallels between The Butcher and President Bush – except for the fact that Day-Lewis makes his character seem more human. The Butcher is also more self-possessed, and in the film’s centrepiece, a tense scene between Day-Lewis and DiCaprio, he admits that he consolidates his power with the spectacle of fearsome acts. Interestingly, many of Bush’s critics are saying the same thing about his reign in the White House.
This subtext makes for an interesting approach to the gangster film – a genre that, to keep itself fresh, has recently resorted to psychoanalytic comedies like Analyze This (which, incidentally, was also written by Lonergan) and its sequel, Analyze That.
Scorsese is too good for those kind of shenanigans, but at least with the themes of loyalty and the passing of an honourable way of life, Gangs offers further familiar ground for moviegoers looking for something to latch onto in this violent whirlwind of a film.
In the end, I found a passing familiarity with Asbury’s book to be helpful in understanding Gangs of New York’s historical references, but hardly essential to an appreciation of its message. It will be interesting to see whether American critics and audiences will also look past the film’s flaws to see its considerable merits. |
