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'Priest' Vallon's murder in 1863 is witnessed by his young son in a gang war over control of
Five Points, New York City's center of crime and poverty.
The boy is sent to reformatory and emerges 16 years later as Amsterdam [Leonardo DiCaprio], glowering with hatred for his father's killer, Bill Cutting aka The Butcher [Daniel Day-Lewis]. Ripe for revenge, Amsterdam returns to Five Points, seeks and finds Cutting still king of the place, and manages to conceal his identity from everybody except his childhood buddy Johnny [Henry Thomas]. Admiring Amsterdam's guts, Cutting takes the young man under his wing and trains him. A strange father-son relationship develops between the two, with Amsterdam working like a bodyguard for Cutting, all the while plotting his death in his hands. Meanwhile, Amsterdam falls in love with Jenny [Cameron Diaz], a pickpocket who as a child saved from starvation by Cutting had in gratitude given herself earlier to the man.
Gangs of New York is filmmaking on a scale that only a director like Scorsese can pull off so well. All of the film's 165 minutes are entirely alive, packing the screen with provocative or at least interesting characters. The sets, costumes, cinematography, editing—all reflect meticulous attention to detail that a historical drama calls for. Actors—especially Day-Lewis—deliver career-defining performances against a backdrop of deprivation and squalor of 19th century New York City.
Despite its technical brilliance, Gangs of New York is not to be viewed as a movie that
educates or entertains. It reeks with dangerous contradictions, to say the least.
Right from the start, it links gut-ripping violence with religious fervor, as though killing one's enemy honors God. After praying to God and favorite intercessors [St. Michael, the Archangel, for instance] for protection and victory, gang men come out of their hovels armed with knives, daggers, cudgels, cleavers, bayonets and all conceivable instruments of murder and torture in order to kill rival gang members. After the rampage the snowcovered battleground turns into a nauseous shade of pink, blotched with red from the blood of the dead. Viewers should take care to remember that this romanticized historical drama is but a movie, not a documentary, lest they begin to believe—due to the movie's focus on personal and mob violence—which the turmoil that gave birth to American democracy merely revolved around a few "gang wars." Historians would argue that the deadly draft riot of 1862 was a racist revolt and not a populist revolt as the movie shows—and this is but one of the misleading things in the movie. Another: the finely realized period details in the movie which can mesmerize the viewer into thinking that a place that is totally devoid of soul (such as Five Points) could really exist. Everybody who's a criminal comes into the director's spotlight—murderers, thieves, perverts, bullies, vote-buying politicians, corrupt cops, prostitutes and pickpockets—and yet in the end the story succeeds in presenting the whole scene as nothing more than a circus ground brimming with weirdoes and freaks. Its characters are not human beings but mere bloodthirsty animals just too ready and willing not to die for their ideals but to kill for their ideologies. Surely God did not mean man, His highest creation, to be just that, relentlessly hating his whole life and dying unrepentant! But if you're not careful, the film's cinematic grandeur could sweep you off your feet, derailing you from your pursuit of Truth.
(Date reviewed: March 28, 2003)
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