Gangs of New York (Cinema: Jan 2003)

So Scorsese's long awaited, eagerly anticipated epic Gangs of New York is finally upon us. A certain amount of uncertainty and nervous anticipation surrounded the film before its release. It is widely agreed Scorsese has gone off the boil since Casino - a disappointing self-indulgent cash-in/re-run of the mighty Goodfellas. Waking the Dead was a missed attempt at recapturing Scorsese's earlier cinematic rawness & the verve of the city. But are we being too harsh? After all, the director has never made consistently great films but rather peaked & troughed like any great artisan. But with two lukewarm efforts behind him, Scorsese is in danger of evoking the film fanatic's three flops & you're out rule. Gangs of New York is essentially the make or break film in terms of Scorsese's integrity - a film to either reestablish his title as the King of Hollywood or an indictment of a filmmaker whose reign is over.

The news is not good. I've heard Gangs described as "cluttered" which is probably the most accurate description of its marauding vision. Scorsese takes too much onboard, something evidenced by the spiralling budget, length of production, the time it took to edit (his first cut reportedly weighed in at close to 4hrs) & the confusion pervading the finished piece. The film starts as a Shakespearian revenge tragedy & ends up a socio-political document on the birth of America. Somewhere along the way the ideology is lost, motivations blurred & we are left floundering as to the point of it all?

The clever camerawork we've come to expect from Marty is exchanged for long sweeps of computer-generated urban geography, in fact the film bears more than a passing resemble to Titanic on many levels. The gory bursts of violence that were once the director's trademark are lost, the cleverly multilayered plot reduced to baby blocks & the usual tour de force of his leads pulped - Day-Lewis' performance is fine but fails to measure up any of Joe Pesci's past performances. In fact the most interesting aspect of the whole production for me is the story of Daniel Day-Lewis being plucked from early retirement, training under a master cobbler in Florence making shoes. What a guy! When you watch the PR interviews and cringe at all the smug pretention & designer chic of even Hollywood's most reluctant stars (Diaz, DiCaprio, Scorsese) & compare them to one humble, t-shirted, shaven headed Day-Lewis you begin to understand why his effort has been so roundly, loudly & deservedly applauded.

Scorsese movies used to be fodder for film students, from The Big Shave to Taxi Driver to Goodfellas. But I don't see Gangs of New York (or anything he's done since Goodfella's) being pawed over by academics & critics in the same way Mean Streets has or for that matter by contemporary filmmakers as in Swingers.

It's sad to see a once great filmmaker fail to measure up to even his own yardstick.

RATING: 1/2 (for Day-Lewis)

(c)Limer 2003