Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

By all rights, I should be genuinely annoyed by Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. It renders a script I've been outlining for three years useless for at least a couple years more. It's not the same plot, but the location and time period are the same and several historical events and figure overlap. Then again, the three years I've spent researching is nothing compared to the 30 years Martin Scorsese spent trying to get Gangs of New York made. And any bitterness I might otherwise have melts away in the face of a simple fact: In a season of very good work by very good filmmakers, the masters still stand out. Alexander Payne, Pedro Almodovar, George Clooney (go figure), Paul Thomas Anderson, Curtis Hanson, and Spike Jonze have made very solid (and even near-great) films in recent months, but you can tell the difference from the first frame of Gangs of New York.

And here's the semi-funny thing: I like Martin Scorsese a lot as a director, but I'm not one of those people who worships him as a directing God. My Best Films of the 1970s list included Taxi Driver, but my Best Films of the 1990s list ignored Goodfellas and, if I ever finish it, my Best Films of the 1980s list will ignore Raging Bull. Somehow I like studying his work more than viewing it much of the time. Gangs of New York is a film of a great many flaws, but Scorsese, on the big screen (don't wait for this on video unless you want to lose its scale entirely), gets away with all of it in a way that talented youngsters like Sam Mendes don't.

Scorsese's canvas for Gangs of New York is nothing less than the history of America itself. And as out national reverence for New York City extends into its second year post-9/11/01, Scorsese's film has a richness and power that it might not have had had he been able to mount it in the mid-1970s as was his original intent. There are three credited screenwriters on Gangs and you can almost tell what each brought to the table. Jay Cocks (Age of Innocence) started with period and locational depth, Steven Zaillian brought in facts, research and structure, and Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me) was on set to put florid period prose on the lips of the characters. The film was fleshed out by craftsmen of the highest order, from Scorsese regulars like cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker to legendary production designer Dante Ferretti and never-less-than-superb costume designer Sandy Powell. And orchestrating everything, of course, is Scorsese, who hasn't made a film since 1999's hit-and-miss Bringing out the Dead.

Gangs of New York opens in 1846 in New York. The first shot goes from Priest Vallon's eyes to his facial hair to his straight razor scraping over his chin. The razor deliberately cuts his cheek and Vallon (Liam Neeson) hands the bloodied razor to his young son. The boy is about to wipe the blood off, but his father tells him to leave it there. Blood, of course, is something you should never be allowed to forget and that goes literally and culturally. Vallon is the leader of a gang of Irish immigrants called the Dead Rabbits and on this morning, the Dead Rabbits are preparing for battle. In a candle-lit maze hidden within an old mission, the Dead Rabbits are arming themselves with knives, hatchets, metallic claws, and any other number of pointy household utensils. Vallon lures burly Monk (Brendan Gleeson) into the fray by promising him "ten per notch" on his beating club and Monk kicks open the door. The screen floors with light and shows the snow-covered ground of the Five Points on the Lower East Side. It's a fantastic introduction to a fantastic location.

In the pure white snow, Vallow and the Dead Rabbits meet with the native born Americans (Nativists) who hate the foreign hoards. They're led by top-hat wearing Bill The Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). Bill has a dropping moustache and a glass eye on which is etched the seal of America. And in the most civilized way possible, Vallon and Bill the Butcher begin the battle. But after declarations of challenges and the like, civility goes out the window and the fight begins. Many are slain as the snow turns pink with blood. But when Bill kills Vallon (as his son Amsterdam watches), the civility returns. Vallon's death is seen as the end of the riot and a triumph for the Nativists. Young Amsterdam is sent away to reform school, but not before he can hide his knife and his father's St. Michael medallion.

Fantastic opening.

16 years later, Amsterdam gets out of reform school looking a lot like a scruffy version of Leonardo DiCaprio. He returns to the Five Points to find it a very different place. Bill the Butcher controls everything, but he's now working in legion with William "Boss" Tweed (Jim Broadbent), the ruler of Tammany Hall. Upon his return, Amsterdam befriends Johnny (Henry "Ell-i-ott" Thomas) and becomes intrigued by a comely pick-pocket named Jenny (Cameron Diaz). But soon, by necessity, Amsterdam finds himself working as an underling to Bill the Butcher, who takes quite the shine to the scrappy lad who in his heart vows nothing but revenge.

Of course, that revenge could take nearly three hours to arrive. In that time we could deal with the 1863 Draft Riots, any number of political dealings, murders, betrayals, and boxing on a barge. The ground not covered by Gangs of New York is mostly the ground not worth covering.

In the first sequence, Scorsese introduces us to Manhattan as an island split between the immigrants, pouring in at ever-greater rates, and the Natives, who may have only been a single generation from immigrants. The 1846 encounter is seen as a civic civil war. But by the time Amsterdam has been "reformed" (first thing he does is throw his Bible off a bridge), the civic strife is suddenly secondary to the Civil War.

Scorsese illustrates the place of the immigrant at this time in an amazing and brief sequence in which Irish immigrants step off the boat, are harassed by the Nativists, find their way to a Draft table, where they're given citizenship and are instantly enlisted. They have no time to even give their fifty dollar prizes to their families before they're given uniforms and put back on another boat to sail South to fight. But in an easy irony, the same boat they're being loaded onto is already unloading coffins from its previous trip.

The country is split and the city remains split. And the idea of what makes an American was more in doubt than ever before. As Amsterdam says in a voice-over, New York was a city of a million accents. And he speaks the truth, since DiCaprio has fifteen or twenty accents all on his own. But I kid. The essence is that everything was splintered and the sense of New York could only be given as a compilation of splinters. In a city with more than 30 competing volunteer fire squads and at least that many street gangs of various ilks, what could ever bring the city together? What could ever give birth to the seeds of modern America?

Blood. Again literal and again cultural.

Scorsese and Dante Ferretti have transformed Rome's Cine Citta studios (which Fellini would rarely use) into a run-down, but beautiful recreation of Manhattan. Without well-documented press notes, I couldn't tell you how many sets Ferretti had to help construct, but the number must have been out of control. Scorsese produces depth with matte paintings and, probably, subtle digital effects. And only a fool would tell you it looks authentic, but it looks gorgeous none the less. The boxing scene on the barge is a mix of any number of composite techniques and my first response was, "That doesn't look natural." And my second was, "Geez, the real thing wouldn't look so great."

The melting pot requires Ferretti to produce interiors befitting several types of ethnic enclaves. The Catholics have a very different standard of living from the Protestants and the newest arrivals to the New World were the Chinese, so Ferretti gets to recreate an opium den and a red silk dominated Asian bar. And in Scorsese's widescreen anamorphic compositions, there's life in every part of the frame. Ferretti's 1862 (and 1846) visions of the city work because they're full of life.

And Powell has costumed that life magnificently from the overdressed Bowery Boys to Bill the Butcher's dandy duds and through any variety of stylized rags, Gangs of New York is, again, much better than the real thing. The varieties of scruffy facial hair are well done and the designer dirt (which never seems to effect DiCaprio, though his facial hair [likely natural] is the scruffiest of the lot]) is also worthy of praise. But hair and dirt aside, the make-up department's biggest chore would have been producing scars and blood and retaining continuity.

Scorsese and his writers overreach fairly significantly and their overreaching raises more issues than it solves. The movie runs 168 minutes and you can feel its length. Herbert Ashbury's book is mostly a survey of, as you might guess, the gangs of New York. It's an excellent overview, but it's not really a narrative so-to-speak. At times the Hooks/Zaillian/Lonergan script falls victim to that absence of narrative. The voice over (which was added in post-production) is needed to tie together many holes and characters often feel like they're listing (gangs, types of crooks, etc). Boss Tweed is the only celebrity who's fully integrated into the story, though P.T. Barnum and Horace Greeley (the newspaper man of "Go West, young man" fame) do appear. And even some of the supporting character seem more like plot necessities than actual humans. Henry Thomas's Johnny, for example, seems very badly mixed in with the world of the Five Points, but from a screenwriting point-of-view, the reason for his presence is clear.

Scorsese wants to tell the story of New York from a perspective that includes race, class, and gender, but the first and last of that group get the short shrift. The script makes repeated reference to the Nativists and their hatreds for the newly emancipated blacks, but when the film's finale revolves around mobs attacking minorities, Scorsese has a responsibility to give the film more of an African-American voice. There's an inexplicable black member of the new Dead Rabbits who seems to be there only to contrast the openness of the immigrants with the racism of the Nativists, but he doesn't really speak, so he's useless. Also, in Diaz's character, Scorsese has the chance to comment on a strong pre-suffrage woman, but any message there would be undermined by extensive relatively unnecessary scenes of topless prostitutes lounging around.

Also, Scorsese's intercutting ranges from brilliant (Schoonmaker and the director do wonderful things joining the Draft Riots with the final Bill-Amsterdam showdown) to the overly symbolic (cutting between Bill and Amsterdam praying for a vengeful God to help them, while a rich family says grace to a generous peaceful god is too easy).

But the visceral flair of the film is undeniable. The two main fight scenes that open and close the film are spectacular feats of editing, direction, and sound design. Even though the first confrontation is made somewhat odd by the accompaniment of a guitar heaven Peter Gabriel composition, it packs an emotional punch. Scorsese should also be given credit for doing his action scenes without the now-pathetically-cliched stroboscopic effect that Spielberg pioneered in the D-Day scene of Saving Private Ryan. Not that Scorsese is immune to tricks, mind you. There's lots of slo-mo and several instances of characters punching or falling right into the camera/audience.

Overall the movie sees Scorsese both restrained (after the oppressive use of pyrotechnics in Bringing Out The Dead) and still smartly flashy. There are countless long tracking shots through the Five Points, many sound tricks (that most viewers will pay not attention to) and the cleaver POV shot that's hinted at in the trailer.

Mostly, though, Scorsese just seems happy to finally be making the film he wanted to make. And in the process he's clearly also relishing the chance to covertly make a Western. The themes and mythology of the film are straight of out your typical Leone or Ford oat opera, even if the settings are not. The homages are everywhere.

And the actors seem pleased to be working with the master and while their accents waver the quality of work doesn't. Broadbent shows just the right amount of civic pride and total corruption as Tweed and a fine movie could follow this character's corrupt reign over New York City. John C. Reilly plays a character whose almost the personification of all Irish cop stereotypes, but it's fun to watch this actor in a period setting. I may tire of that idea, though, after watching him as a Jazz Age husband in Chicago and a 1950s era husband in The Hours. And Brendan Gleeson is amazing as Monk the barber, who appears to be a greedy mercenary, but ends up providing the film's central spiritual message.

Cameron Diaz is sexy and smart and she actually has an acceptable amount of chemistry with DiCaprio. She's still the hottest urchin ever to set foot in 1860s Manhattan, but she can be forgiven, I guess, for being beautiful. This may be her most fully rounded performance, and it's almost enough for me to forgive her for The Sweetest Thing. And DiCaprio is good, although his speech patterns were always too modern for my tastes. Covering up his pretty boy image nicely, he does nicely intense work.

Then there's Daniel Day-Lewis. As we left the theatre, I asked a friend if he had ever seen a better performance that went so wildly over the top. As much scenery as Dante Ferretti could design, Day-Lewis could chew. And yet, the character is effectively and humanly drawn. You just believe that Bill the Butcher might be the most blustery man every to walk through Brooklyn. With his own strange accent and a determined madness, this is a juicy supporting role stretched into a near-lead.

The U2 song that closes Gangs of New York, "The Hands That Built America," is maybe the most anonymous song the group has ever recorded (complimenting Howard Shore's anonymous pseudo-Irish score) and my immediate response was that it was a big mistake to start playing it over the final few shots of the film. But then the final shot gave me shivers and all was forgiven.

That's the way this movie works for me. Every time I started to have problems the pure filmmaking swept me away. This is a 4.5 star movie, but I'm going up to 5 just for fun. Gangs of New York is certain to be among the five best movies of the year.





Recommended: Yes