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As
Martin Scorsese’s film opens, we are told that
‘St Michael the Archangel drove Satan out of
Paradise’ — Paradise Square being the local
plot upon which the first of many battles in Gangs
of New York commences. Such a struggle —
self-consciously mythic symbols — comprises the
movie’s theme, fought over in the Five Points
slum of Manhattan and across the country in the American
Civil War: who is in charge of the nation’s destiny?
Is it the nativists or the Irish, coming in 15,000
a week to Castle Island? The abolitionists and the
slaves and the teeming masses, or those who got there
first and got theirs first?
Daniel
Day-Lewis, literally tongue-in-cheek, has great fun
with his never more sinister than when amusing character:
Bill the Butcher, the local “native” cut-throat,
an anti-Catholic godfather in cahoots with Boss Tweed
(Tammany Hall’s rousingly sardonic, oily pol
played with unctuous hypocrisy by Jim Broadbent) controls
New York City by dividing the immigrants so as to
conquer them. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and
editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese veterans, both
enliven the texture of the director’s vision
with golds, sepias, Fellinesque carnival and bordello
and church. History aflame: the whole film saturates
with a familiarity surprising us: within the urban
core, we see what looks more like ramshackle frontier
facades and half-built tenements. The rawness of lives
spent begging, whoring, brawling and toiling truly
scrapes at us — the first sounds we hear in the
film are those of a razor upon flesh. A fine scene
shows a grimy saloon where the lyrics of ‘New
York Girls’ comment (contrasting with Howard
Shore’s clumsy score, sprinklings of Irish folk
enliven the film’s texture all too infrequently
— why Robbie Robertson is its ‘musical director’
is anybody’s guess) on its motley females for
hire within. Almost like the bar scene in Star
Wars. Such examples illustrate how the movie’s
dynamism better sustains itself in sumptuous set design
and off-hand nuances than a gripping storyline. The
sheer weight of two and three-quarter hours drags
down too much of the playing time into leaden set-pieces
visually stunning but often dramatically inert. The
problem is that two major events here conflate clumsily
into one clichéd narrative.
Since
the film starts in 1846, the earlier New York has
not yet been really taken over by enough invading
Irish. The revenge plot set up here holds no surprises:
melodramatic convention leaves Leonardo diCaprio’s
vengeful ‘Amsterdam’ and Cameron Diaz’
pickpocketing prostitute ‘Jenny’ with little
opportunity to deliver much beneath their characters’
superficial dialogue. After a powerful brawl, the
film jumps ahead to 1862; now the Irish masses are
much more threatening, although Boss Tweed meets the
boats with soup, bread, and — after those embarking
immediately sign in as citizens — an appeal to
these unwashed hordes to vote Tammany. The oul’
Oirish boyos from the slum have long been broken up;
one has turned traitor, one’s a cop, one’s
been shunted aside. Soon, another will prove an informer:
Irish American plot devices always endure, long before
Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney. Here the Bowery
Boys are still vehemently anti-papist. Thankfully,
despite the prominent medal and crucifix expected
in a Scorsese movie about betrayal and redemption
and blood-sacrifice, we are spared a gunrunning priest,
although the one cleric shown here looks pretty menacing
precisely because of his oddly Christ-like mien. The
‘Priest’ in the opening is only that in
costume: the father of the son who seeks to avenge
his death, the Kerry-born leader of the pack, with
a ‘dog-collar’; protecting his neck and
packing a handy-sized Celtic cross (where do you buy
these?) as his chosen weapon. Ah, no heavy-handed
symbolism here to be sure.
Not
much insight might be expected from an action film,
and here Brendan Gleeson (Monk McGinn) delivers the
obligatory nod to the past. The Irish have fought
the invader for a thousand years, he tells Amsterdam,
but he never thought the war would follow them here
to these new shores. I suppose Monk’s counting
Vikings as the Saxon precursors to make it already
much longer than the rhetorical 800 years of oppression
rebels a century and a half later have rejected. Gleeson’s
role appears to have been more substantial than the
film as shown presents, along with Liam Neeson’s
and John C. Reilly’s personae. All fine actors,
they need more space to act than the script and editing
allow them here. There are lapses throughout that
may be faulted due to the battles fought between Miramax
and Scorsese over a cut that the director delivered
of about 3:40. The overwhelming heft, for the eye
and ear, that this film drops into the viewer’s
squirming lap leaves you with Gangs of New York
as too much for one sitting. What could have been
either an intriguing look into the motley peoples
already comprising NYC: Chinese, blacks, Germans,
Poles, ‘natives’ and of course Irish or
the draft riots recedes into quick peeks: the varieties
of criminal gangs, the Asian subculture, the downtown
aristocracy, political corruption, the fire brigades,
and the free blacks, to name a few-becomes more a
vivid but fragmented dream once you’ve emerged
from the theatre.
While
the final part of the film revives you with a fantastically
edited montage and frantic voiceover as the draft
riots break out and the Irish reject having to pay
$300 to buy out of forced conscription in a war they
see fought to free blacks who will only undercut the
immigrants’ own hard-won barely-paid employment,
it’s too much too late. This should have been
its own film alone. Awkwardly, the film must make
out the Irish to be bigots and lynchers even as it
tries to also explain the draft riots (still the most
deadly in U.S. history) as a class war against the
Yankee cabal. The Irish, after all, were heavily represented
both among the rioters and those who sought to end
the riots among the police and the soldiery. After
already a feature-length film about Amsterdam’s
long-planned comeuppance of his father’s killer,
now we see the riots manipulated as a backdrop for
Amsterdam’s own duel to the death. It gets confusing
and rather unbelievable. As the natives and the Irish
face off at Five Points, the U.S. Navy happens to
simultaneously bombard Paradise Square. Talk about
Scorsese’s mean streets. No deus present, except
the priest, but quite an assault ex machina.
We
have to watch survivors staggering through smoke,
and the last image of the film incorporates the Twin
Towers. The script and symbols insist — powerfully
but hamfistedly — in that multicultural indoctrination
so urged upon current Americans as to this film’s
relevance. Yet what a jumble: the condition of the
blacks never is clarified: some live in Five Points,
so why then the fight against them? The role hinted
at between Amsterdam and the Chinese: another puzzle.
The class gap between the nativists and municipal
hegemony: rushed through. All the other newly arrived
Europeans in the presumably polyglot city: barely
acknowledged. Although a welcome bit of Gaelic here
and there shows just how foreign the Irish could be
to the ‘natives’, much in this film appears
to have been lost on the cutting room floor. But still
we have time for the finale, rising into yet another
bombastic U2 song, ‘The Hands that Built America.’
All I could think about was why we had to hear the
band in the opening clip, synthesizers and all, circa
1846, and how ‘The Man that Built America’
had already been taken by Horslips.
Paradise
Alley appeared a few months ago from historical
researcher turned novelist Kevin Baker. I read it
before watching the film, and its explanations of
the riots deepen what in the film becomes rapid voiceover
and snippets of dialogue alone. The action of this
novel — set not only in Five Points but ranging
over the city — occurs during the draft riots,
but concentrates upon the black-Irish interactions
that preceded and precipitated the reaction. The best
scene in Gangs for me showed in one take this
panorama: Irish coming off the boat, being pelted
with rocks by native gangs, taken aside by Tammanyites
and handed bread and a reminder to vote. Then passing
a table where men sign up to be a citizen and then
sign up for the army. They change into uniforms, are
armed with a reminder ‘keep your muskets dry’,
and bid farewell to mothers and families. As they
board their second ship, wondering aloud where Tennessee
is, we see overhead coffins being taken off the troopship
and placed on the wharf near the point of embarkation
of the immigrant Irish only minutes before.
Baker
heats this tension into which the Irish arrive and
simmers another potboiler similar in its revenge and
violence to Scorsese’s recipe. Both draw upon
the same sources. But Baker offers characters —
male and female, unlike Scorsese’s masculine
imbalance — scarred by famine, by slavery, and
by exploitation that we comprehend more convincingly
than the scenes in Gangs. True, a six-hundred
page novel may take us longer to navigate than even
a Hollywood blockbuster, but the pay-offs reveal a
complexity of relationships in the already filthy,
squalid, and sordid metropolis that set designers
and costumers can furnish only for the exteriors.
Baker (if again his novel sags under its own ambition)
nonetheless can enter the consciousness of both an
escaped slave and famine survivors more powerfully
than Scorsese can in the predictability of his appealingly
stuffed but ultimately hollow characters portrayed
in his film. See it for its wonderful look - Dickens
meets Sergio Leone - but for the depth, read Baker
or the best novel on the event, Peter Quinn’s
1994 Banished Children of Eve. Now, that
should have been a movie!
For
more Gangs of New York, see Mike Davis's
The Bloody Streets
of New York
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