Ray Pride

Martin Scorsese and innumerable conspirators have struggled for almost three decades to produce "Gangs of New York," and yet it is a terrible movie. This hellish horror of failed ambition should freeze the blood of any artist who has held too long to a primal obsession and fears that a life's work will be shown up as an ineffective folly.

A respected colleague thinks it's "the best Western since `Unforgiven,'" and I look forward to his review. But the defenders of Scorsese's poorest pictures of the past decade, like "Casino," will surely again sound like minions of a cult, humming Scorsese's praises just because he's Scorsese. Those who give "Gangs of New York" an 'A' for its aspiration will be deceiving themselves about this clotted, overproduced historical epic. This is not Sergio Leone, or "Once Upon a Time in Nolita." As with the preposterous raves for the undernourished "Bringing out the Dead," the improvident praise for this clumsy, puerile picture has already begun, with Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, the grandest quote courtesan of them all, anointing it his movie of the year.

The violent story is both simple and unduly complicated; a coming-of-age narrative in which a young boy enters manhood by seeking revenge against someone who becomes a father figure to him. Personal vendettas play out against a social backdrop that is readily footnoted, but almost impossible to follow on screen. Leonardo DiCaprio, who is joyously carefree in "Catch Me If You Can," is a puffy cipher as Amsterdam Vallon, a young man who exits Hellgate House of Reform after sixteen years into the Five Points, the nation's most reviled slum in Civil War-era Manhattan. He has one goal: revenge on the gang boss who murdered his father, "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, the baroque character of his garb, lingo and epic hamming screaming Oscar). They share the love of a damaged young woman, a spirited cutpurse named Jennie Everdeane (Cameron Diaz, who gives a focused performance even when her speeches are schematic). There's a bustle of other characters, particularly well-acted by Brendan Gleeson and also by Jim Broadbent, whose performance as corrupt Boss Tweed is a marvel of harrumphing complexity.

The dandified result is of the variety David Mamet dismisses as pageant. It preens, it postures; its streets are cluttered with props and costumes and Dante Ferretti's lovely battered buildings, yet the characters aren't interesting and its depiction of gang slaughter and the decade's violent Draft Riots are more self-important than self-explanatory. Scorsese's many interviews explicating all his sound and fury is about as relevant as the horribly misguided, redundant voiceover. Blood and capital was spilled, we get that point. But it is all indicated instead of dramatized, willed instead of embodied. This is chilly work that attempts a hot surface, wanting to be an operatic rendition of a lost era in Manhattan's dirty, brutal history.

Whether "Gangs of New York" was cut to two hours or ran a full three, as an earlier version reportedly did, I still cannot imagine the jerrybuilt fiction of this epic historical disaster to have any emotional impact. It is history as fever dream; a sweeping narrative of revenge in which the man who seeks revenge is a barely acted nobody, and the one upon whom revenge is wished is a glorious burlesque villain. (It's as if Joe Pesci's sociopath Tommy DeVito was the central character of "Goodfellas" rather than Ray Liotta's Henry Hill.)

Scorsese's visual vocabulary is seldom composed of telling images--note Roman Polanski's upcoming "The Pianist" by contrast for superlative use of capturing meaning through metaphor and telling juxtapositions. Shockingly, Scorsese resorts to editing and image-manipulation techniques that seem drawn more from the grammar of coming-attractions trailers rather than the abundant loam of classical cinema in which Scorsese steeps. I'm sure he could tell you what he's quoting in each sequence, but that is the stuff of DVD commentaries and not of the sweet mystery of competent storytelling. Yet the ending is majestic, standing tall above the windy disaster that precedes those transcendent instants.

After the film's lengthy riot climax, when the smoke has cleared and the bodies have been buried, Amsterdam and Jennie are sepia figures atop a ridge of the cemetery that overlooks the island. One last voice-over explains and reassures and clanks like lead. They leave the frame and we see a series of dissolves to a Berenice Abbott-style tableaux ushering in successive eras of New York and its burgeoning architecture. The Brooklyn Bridge arrives, its sweep across the CinemaScope frame; a 1920s skyline, then 1940s. The eye measures, muses what final skyline we will be left with? We know the image that would be perfect, a skyline that will not fit the frame but that extends far enough downtown to include it.

And there is more: the mood is just right, even if the U2 song playing to the credits is unmemorable. The music fades. The names continue. Sound fades up: distant street traffic. Taxi horns carom randomly off the sides of buildings. A cross-town bus moans. A car alarm bleats. No voices, only the taken-for-granted machines of progress. The sounds of twenty-first-century civilization, blooming like flowers in spring. And silence, several minutes of silence. I wish Scorsese had made a film as beautiful as those two masterstrokes--as wistful, as heartfelt, as wondrous, as meaningful, and I would have cried for 165 minutes instead of only five.

"Gangs of New York" opens Friday.

(2002-12-18)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
What's Irish painter and decorator Desmond Doyle (Pierce Brosnan) to do when his wife scoots out on him the day after Christmas with an Englishman, leaving him with two young boys and a small girl?
(2002-12-12)

The J-Lo Show
While Wayne Wang doesn't do for Lopez what Steven Soderbergh did in "Out of Sight," the often-indie Hong Kong-born veteran still brings an unlikely combination of romance and working-class verisimilitude to what could have been just another "Pretty Woman" wannabe.
(2002-12-12)

Tip of the Week
The first anniversary of the ambitious monthly showcase of music, film shorts, and videos takes over the Biograph for the weekend.
(2002-12-04)

DVD Tip of the Week
hile it's nice to see behind-the-scenes footage of the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 "Contempt" ("Le mepris") and a new interview with cinematographer Raoul Coutard among other features in a two-DVD edition, the great gift is the film itself.
(2002-12-04)

Time regained
(2002-12-04)

My Big Fat Night
(2002-12-04)

Turn into the slide
(2002-11-26)

Perfectly mediocre
(2002-11-20)

Tip of the Week
(2002-11-13)

Imitation of Life
(2002-11-13)

Tip of the Week
(2002-11-06)

Purty mouth
(2002-11-06)

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