I just read the critic of this film in the Financial Times two days ago (a transatlantic flight is quite long
), a real execution :
Cinema: Oversized, overstaged and over here
By Nigel Andrews
Published: January 8 2003 19:49 | Last Updated: January 8 2003 19:49
GANGS OF NEW YORK (18)
Martin Scorsese
Sometimes "long-awaited" can seem less a buzz-word than a curse-word, or at least an epithet of ill omen. Just how long is long? When your film Gangs of New York is incarcerated for a year on Miramax Island, that infamous holding jail for movies awaiting release into Manhattan and the world, is there something wrong with it, or you, or the detainers? "You" are the director Martin Scorsese, American cinema's Visionary Laureate, so surely the fault is not yours. The detainers are the Miramax- running Weinsteins, led by the notorious Hands-On Harvey, a man who demands participation in every decision taken in or near his fiefdom.
My suspicion is that most of the characters in this nearly three-hour fresco of 1840s gang warfare in pre-skyscraper New York, a film that comes on like a fancy-dress West Side Story or Les Mis with attitude, are based on US film-industry personnel. How else explain why this film was made? How else explain why it was so weirdly delayed? If it is a poison-pen pantomime or an antic drame a` clef, it would at least clarify why Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis and Cameron Diaz prance around in costumes amid overbearing Cinecittá sets for what seems an eternity, trying to pretend there is enough plot for 65 minutes, let alone 165.
Scorsese's source is Herbert Asbury's 1928 book about the brutal urban battles between Irish newcomers and self-styled Natives in the years leading to the US civil war. For antagonists such as Bill the Butcher (Day-Lewis with stovepipe hat, black handlebars and prototype Noo Yawk accent) and Amsterdam Vallon (a fuller-faced-and- muscled Di Caprio), out to avenge his dad's first-scene murder, the larger north-south conflict is a little non-local difficulty interfering with their insular Armageddon. By the film's close New York is a smoking, scalding meld of gang war, draft protest and general hullabaloo, complete with ships firing grapeshot into the very heart of designer Dante Ferretti's vast, stylish, but also stubbornly stagy backlot set.
For the director of Raging Bull and Goodfellas this must have seemed a dream project. No one is better at showing how and why people beat each other's brains out, from the apparent casus belli to the deepest, most metaphysical ones. Here he could enlarge and historicise that theme, putting modern-dress thrills aside to become a Big Apple Dickens or Hugo.
But what happens? The fustianism suffocates him. Where Scorsese's modern characters are compellingly believable - walking, ticking psychodramas waiting for their alarms to go off (or their bombs) - the dramatis personae here are jerry-built and generic. Day-Lewis plays his stage villain with more panache than the role deserves. But DiCaprio's avenging giant-killer is a hole in the screen: the character never fills his assigned and scripted space. And Cameron Diaz flounces around with carpet-dye hair and do-it-yourself accent as - yes! - a tart with a heart.
The moment of world-beating bathos comes when Day-Lewis has DiCaprio in his power, with dagger and cleaver ready to whoosh down on the hero's skull. Guess what - he spares him. Why? Because there still is an hour to go. "Dying would be too good for you, Mr Bond." It is on that level, like pretty much the whole film.
I usually like to set aside a short paragraph at the end of a bad review to list redeeming merits. But in Gangs of New York there are none. It is just a disaster: oversized, overstaged and now over here. The sole comfort is that only a great artist can make such a consummate, gargantuan, hash of an ambitious project. It takes a kind of grandeur, a recklessness of vision and commitment, to which the mediocre can never aspire.
