(fwd frmo Yoshie Furuhashi) Re: more on "Gangs of NewYork"

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just watched _Gangs of New York_.

Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) writes:

>And is it churlish to ask why, after making so many allusions to
>nativists, Scorsese couldn't allude even once to Native Americans to
>throw some ironic backlighting on the label? But who knows? Maybe
>some real Native Americans got lost in the final edit.

There is at least one allusion to American Indians in the film:
paintings of tribal chiefs in their battle finery displayed in Boss
Tweed's office building, into which the chief of the nativist gang
Bill "the Butcher" Cutting walks.  It's a visual irony (about the
American ideology's reduction of Indians to cultural icons
appropriated for the colonizers and their descendants and
subordinates who now claim the status of being "native"),
unaccompanied by any spoken reference to it, but the camera dwells
upon the paintings long enough to make a point.

David Denby (New Yorker) writes:

>The endless gang war is presented as a love of fighting for its own
>sake, acted out strictly along ethnic lines. I'm no Marxist, but I
>can't believe that such a war would be fought without a material
>cause. Was it a battle for control of the East Side docks? The
>whiskey trade? Gambling? Distribution of matchsticks and dustpans?
>Grounded in nothing but blood, the gang war seems a mere projection
>of an audience-pleasing device onto the past. Scorsese and his
>writers drop Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) and Tammany Hall corruption
>into the action, but historical allusiveness is not the same thing
>as historical accuracy.

It is true that Scorsese does not do justice to material grounds of
ethnic competition, but the film is not oblivious of them.  (1) Five
Points, over which the Anglo nativists and the Irish Dead Rabbits
struggle, is represented as a place where gambling, prostitution,
prize fighting, drug dealing, trade in stolen goods, etc. are
lucrative for those who can control it (cops and gang leaders) -- not
as lucrative as legitimate businesses but nonetheless objects of
deadly competition for those who have nothing to lose.  (2) Bill "the
Butcher" Cutting makes a brief reference to job competition (poor
Irish just off the boat would work for a quarter of what "native
Americans" would earn) in a waterfront scene.  (3) Bill's nativist
gang and the Irish Dead Rabbits (reconstituted by Amsterdam) compete
for Boss Tweed's patronage in return for their ability to marshal
votes.  The problem is not so much a total absence of references to
material grounds of ethnic competition but severe underdevelopment of
them.

The film (as it is released), however, is unable to elaborate on the
relation between the Irish and blacks:

*****   Let It Bleed
Gangs of New York is too damned short.
By David Edelstein
Updated Friday, December 20, 2002, at 2:16 PM PT

...The movie, from a script by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and
Kenneth Lonergan, is not the disaster that has long been rumored (and
that its studio, Miramax, evidently thinks it is). Whatever its fate
at the box office, it's a magnificent achievement -- holes, tatters,
crudities, screw-ups, and all. The problem is that a definitive
assessment is impossible as long as we're stuck with a
2-hour-and-45-minute cut in lieu of Scorsese's preferred
3-and-a-half-hour version. It's rarely a good idea to review a movie
one hasn't seen -- and the longer cut, if it ever shows up, could
prove to be deadly. But I doubt it. The film in its current state
cries out for a wider canvas, for more and longer scenes of the
universe outside its central triangle of movie stars and ham-fisted
melodrama.

Gangs of New York begins as the story of a boy, Amsterdam Vallon, and
his tribe, and Scorsese has you first believing it's a flashback to
medieval Ireland: The Irish, led by Amsterdam's father (Liam Neeson),
a solemn priest, sharpen their knives, kneel before a cross, and
ritualistically proceed through a cavernous warehouse to the street
-- an American, 19th-century street, on which they meet Day-Lewis'
Bill the Butcher and his blue-kerchiefed army of "Nativists." The
carnage that follows is a little too self-consciously stylized for my
taste -- it features a slew of mythically low-angle close-ups of
combatants, along with half-second images of split skulls and blood
geysers. But Scorsese establishes that the violence will be ferocious
and horrific, not exhilarating. And as the butcher carves up the
priest in front of his young son's eyes, he shows the primal, caveman
rage of these men, who regard the stakes as monumental.

The first two-thirds of the movie is shaped as a classical revenge
tale, with Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) returning from the "House of
Refuge" reformatory after 16 years. Concealing his identity from
everyone but his friend Johnny (Henry Thomas), Amsterdam insinuates
himself into Bill the Butcher's gang, which includes some of his
father's old cohorts. And then, in spite of himself, Amsterdam begins
to be drawn to the charismatic older man, who celebrates the killing
of Priest Vallon not with mockery but genuine reverence, as the
overthrow of an honorable warrior king. The dynamic is more
interesting than that of the usual revenge saga: It even carries a
whiff of Goodfellas (1990) in the way that Amsterdam starts to enjoy
the power of being in Bill's inner circle -- to the point of
protecting Bill from other would-be assassins.

The older man becomes Amsterdam's teacher in the art of killing, and
he doesn't seem to mind when the youth takes up with a woman he once
slept with and nurtured, the beauteous pickpocket Jenny (Cameron
Diaz). In the film's most oddly touching scene, Amsterdam, having
just made love to Jenny, wakes to find Bill sitting in a rocking
chair beside the bed, eager to talk about the day he cut his own eye
out when it looked away from an enemy, the dead priest Vallon, and
the crumbling of civilization. "God bless you," Bill concludes.

In the past, Scorsese's most evocative work was shot on actual
streets, but the New York of Gangs of New York was created from
scratch in Rome at the Cinecitta Studios. The director,
cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and production designer Dante
Ferretti have gone for a dark palette with low, smoky skies and
colors unintensified by sunlight. Working closely with Luc Sante, who
documented the era in his irresistible history Low Life, they've
created a jumbled, claustrophobic maze of listing wooden shacks and
walkways, of cobblestone streets winding in and out of muddy paths.
There's a lavish, music-hall staging of Uncle Tom's Cabin and a
Chinese opera; and when Amsterdam prevails upon his father's old ally
Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson) to run against Bill the Butcher's
candidate for sheriff, Scorsese packs a whole political campaign into
a couple of tumultuous minutes.

It's a circus of a city, teeming with extras looking impressively
busy. You can sense that Scorsese lost himself in this ecosystem --
and that he lost control of the drama along the way. Cameron Diaz
begins delectably as a hellion, a pickpocket, a "bludget" (alley
robber), a "turtle dove" (housemaid impostor), and "a prim-lookin'
stargazer" (prostitute). But suddenly she's a boringly conventional
ingenue, torn between her new love and her former surrogate daddy.
And the screenwriters forgot to give DiCaprio a way to hold his own
against Day-Lewis: He shows little of the spring-heeled impudence he
had in Titanic (1997) and has in the coming Catch Me If You Can. Leo
is left to watch dourly from behind a grubby little chin-beard while
his co-star chews the scenery.

The DiCaprio-Diaz nonevent wouldn't matter as much if the movie
hadn't been edited to emphasize the love triangle in lieu of other,
more epic matters. Gangs of New York doesn't climax merely with the
face-off between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher: It builds to the New
York Draft Riots of 1863, when a mob of mostly Irish immigrants (some
of them fresh off the boat) took to the streets to protest being
shipped off to die on the front lines of the Civil War. (Sons of the
elite could buy out of the draft for the then-princely sum of $300.)
Suddenly Amsterdam's tribe -- until now the good guys -- are shown
lynching many newly emancipated African-Americans and getting blown
away by federal troops; and the death-struggle between Amsterdam and
Bill becomes absurdly beside the point.

That's a profound -- and surprising -- change of direction for the
movie. It signals the end of medieval tribalism and the coming of a
new, nationalized power. But as the film has been trimmed (at the
behest of New York's own Bill the Butcher, Harvey Weinstein), the
change hasn't been prepared for. The scenes of conscription are brief
and schematic and have no dramatic power; and it's never clear how
Amsterdam -- who has black friends and who has taken no position on
the draft -- feels about his people suddenly taking on the
government. When the federal troops arrive and the cannon balls start
flying, it's out of nowhere. It's as if, in Gladiator (2000), Maximus
(Russell Crowe) and Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) began to square off in
the Colosseum and suddenly the place was overrun by Visigoths.

In its present form, anyway, Day-Lewis upstages this whole bloody
stew of a movie. It's a wondrously, overpoweringly weird piece of
acting: With his perversely deliberate speech patterns, Day-Lewis
sounds more foreign than any of the so-called foreigners he's
fighting, and he's not quite human. He squashes his eyes and curls
his lower lip under his rolling mustache, then leans forward and
strides through the sets in his plaid yellow trousers on legs that
look like stilts. "Who does he remind me of?" I kept asking myself.
Then I knew: He's like one of those giant puppets you see in Balinese
theater or in left-wing agitprop troupes like the Bread and Puppet
Circus. He's tacky and splendid and scaled to Scorsese's dreams.
Maybe someday Gangs of New York will emerge with comparable stature.

<http://slate.msn.com/id/2075910/>   *****
--
Yoshie

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