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Of the themes that have run consistently through Martin Scorsese's film canon, two of the most persistent and critical are the relationship between legitimate authority and the so-called underworld (the complex relationship between "respectable people" and their money and the mob in Casino, the affable graft-happy cop in Goodfellas who takes swag from Robert DeNiro and says, "You know, Jimmy, I'd complain, but who would listen?" the fact that one of the slimeballs killed by Travis Bickle's hail of gunfire at the end of Taxi Driver was a cop, etc.) and the power of the clan, the "family" represented in an ethnic identity, neighborhood, what have you. These strands have run throughout Scorsese's career, and in Gangs of New York, they receive their most powerful, trenchant, and resonant attention. After spending thirty years documenting the dynamics of power relations, revealing the essential corruption and hypocrisy of "legal" authority, Scorsese has finally traced this legacy of American power and politics to a potent nexus of history; the slums of Lower Manhattan in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The antecedents of Scorsese's earlier film mobsters are here, stripped of their yuppie social climbing pretensions and antiseptic organization, churning and lashing at each other and the world in a cauldron of neglect and poverty. Out of this powderkeg of classist, racial, religious and ethnic clan conflict would come a massive explosion; the New York City draft riots of 1863, and from the ashes of its defeat at the hands of government power would come the birth of modern America; bureauacratized, institutionalized and centered around profit.
The film opens with a staggering depiction of the Old Brewery slum at the Five Points in 1846, a recreation that will stun anyone who has read Herbert Ashbury's book "Gangs of New York" and tried to picture the horrors of the Old Brewery as he describes them. The battle between Bill the Butcher's Nativists and Liam Neeson's Irish coalition is stagged brilliantly. Scorsese successes where Ridley Scott failed in the opening sequence of Gladiator. Scott attempted to recreate the mindless confusion of battle, but the incoherence of his camera veered to close to the abstract to have impact. Scorsese similarly puts his camera into a frenzy, but maintains a powerful sense of cohesion. The entire film, in fact, practically pulsates with life; every frame is filled to the brim with immaculatly recreated hellish detail that literally creates a reality of its own.
The ostensible plot of Gangs, following Leo's attempts to avenge his fathers death at the hands of Daniel Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher and his romance with pickpocket Cameron Diaz is somewhat pale, but that is as it SHOULD BE! The centerpiece of Gangs is the terrible drama of history unfolding, of the fate of a nation being decided, and, as Humphrey Bogart said, "the lives of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Unlike recent historical "epics" such as Titanic and Pearl Harbor which use history as essentially a backdrop for hackneyed romance, Gangs gives the central narrative an appropriately muted tone. Still, the relationship between DiCaprio's Amsterdam and Day-Lewis' Bill is interesting and tense: both men are at war with themselves; Amsterdam both hates Bill and seeks his fatherly approval, while Bill is a relic whose convictions are untenable: his vehement hatred of the Irish immigrants pouring into New York is undermined by both the necessities of maintaining his criminal empire, and the fact that many of his best lieutenants and even his surrogate children are Irish. The romance is thankfully understated and Cameron Diaz luckily manages not to embarrasse herself too greatly.
The portrait of America's greatest crisis and greatest ferment in vivid and provacative. The government, Lincoln's righteous Union, is shown in a bracingly cynical light: the Federal government sees the Irish as cannon fodder, and Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed, played with perfect uncutous sleaze by Jim Broadbent, extorts them for their value as politcal juice. The up town upper crusts indulge in dilletante reformism when not completely ignore the hell of the Five Points. The Draft Riots, when they come, are filmed at a gripping pace and terrifyingly crafted; it truly seems as though Armaggeddon has touched Fifth Avenue. The depiction of the riot's dispersal is unflinchingly brutal, as it must be to convey the gravity of it. Only by wading ankle deep in the blood is the government able to reassert its final authority in New York City, as it had to do to assert that final authority througout the south in 1865.
Much has been made of Daniel Day-Lewis' peformance, as it should be. He is absolutely magnetic as the symbol of the America that was in its initial death throes during the Civil War. DiCaprio is not his equal, but he does manage to maintain a brooding presence throughout the film.
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