Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2022. I’m so happy you’re here.
Is Gangs of New York bad? Could Gangs of New York be bad? Either Gangs of New York is bad and we’re all choosing to see it in a favorable light because of Martin Scorsese, or it’s actually pretty good but we’re being extra harsh comparing it to the rest of the oeuvre of Martin Scorsese. I honestly can’t tell! It’s got everything going for it, starting with an unbelievably stacked cast and rich production design. If Scorsese has one type of character he can film like no other, it’s gangsters, and if he’s got one city he can film like no other, it’s New York. And yet! It just…it doesn’t hit.
The Gangs of New York is a book from 1927 about the NYC underworld. Jay Cocks—who also helped script Scorsese’s take on The Age of Innocence and later co-wrote Silence—began turning it into a screenplay in 1976. Almost 30 years later, Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List!) and Kenneth Lonergan (Kenny!) took passes at it, and up on screen it went. The result is a sprawling, Once Upon a Time in America–ish epic about Irish immigration to New York ahead of the Civil War. The themes and threads are…numerous. There’s plenty of white-on-white crime, under it all is a simmering resentment that poor whites are being conscripted by rich whites to go South and fight for [racial epithet]s they’ve never met. In Lower Manhattan, then called the Five Points, street gangs pull petty crimes to pay off bosses like Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), Policeman Mulraney (John C. Reilly), and Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent).
History itself may be a combination of different interests and operators, but narratives need a singular thrust, and the movie can’t pick one.
History itself may be a combination of different interests and operators, but narratives need a singular thrust, and the movie can’t pick one. Leo DiCaprio as Amsterdam Vallon is avenging his father but without the pathos of Hamlet; Brendan Gleeson is the last honest mercenary; Tammany Hall…does something. Amsterdam befriends Bill, the man he’s set out to kill, in order to…learn some lessons? Then he tries to attack Bill, but Bill gets the upper hand and disfigures Vallon’s face, except that next time we see him he’s not really disfigured at all. And then…I give up on a recap; read Wikipedia if you’re interested. It’s too many threads to tie together, and despite the on-screen headlines and an expositional voiceover, it’s hard to keep tabs on what’s going on.
Still, with such fine performances and expert filmmaking, should we even care? It’s a feeling, an era, a precipice, a place, a turning of the wheel of history. The first two times I watched this movie, I couldn’t put my finger on what I didn’t like about it and why it didn’t work. But on the third go-around, I got it! I found the bad parts, the bruises on the apple that need to be cut out. The violent opening battle is shot and scored like an early-’90s music video. The slow-motion moments—a cleaver spinning through the air and, even more obviously, a Bible hitting the surface of a murky river—can be excised entirely. Cameron Diaz can handle emoting her material but she’s useless at the accent. The music should lean harder into the period (and by the way, Howard Shore, you don’t fool me—I hear you reusing entire bars from your Lord of the Rings score!).
Final note: Daniel Day-Lewis’ blue hat and belt look silly, as does his eagle-stamped fake eye. He can have one or the other, but together it’s too much. Ahh, the satisfaction of knowing why a movie that came out 20 years ago isn’t great.
Plus, there’s the fact that DD-L is walking away with every scene he’s in, leaving naught but scraps on the table for his co-stars. Reilly, DiCaprio, and Gleeson (and Neeson, in the prologue) are well-balanced, but Day-Lewis can’t help but…well, if he doesn’t chew the scenery, he definitely sniffs it. Bill is the center sun around which the criminal underworld revolves, and he repeatedly states that he is motivated by xenophobia and a desire to honor his dad. He needs something more pressing, present, and attainable; Bill can do basically nothing to stop the influx of Irish immigrants, so instead of making progress as an antagonist, he’s left to rage and rage. It’s thrilling to watch, but it doesn’t go anywhere.
Daniel Day-Lewis is walking away with every scene he’s in, leaving naught but scraps on the table for his co-stars... If he doesn’t chew the scenery, he definitely sniffs it.
Beyond these tweaks, I have another suggestion to shift the overall tone of the film, and since it’s not actually possible to go back in time and talk to editor Thelma “My Queen” Schoonmaker about this, I’ll leave it to you: watch Gangs of New York like it’s a comedy. There’s a lot of humor in Scorsese’s “dramas”—Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas come to mind immediately. But Gangs is straight-up farcical. When a house catches fire, various fire brigades squabble over whose jurisdiction they’re in while street punks ransack the place. No one even tries to put the blaze out. Diaz and DiCaprio meet-cute when they bump into each other and then immediately pat themselves down; they each know the other to be a pickpocket. Big Government scams immigrants into joining the Union army; Local Government marches them down to the polls to vote two, three times. There’s politicking and ridiculous accents, gangs with silly names, that old-timey boxing pose (you know the one), and more.
Near the end, Bill fake-cries over a dead rabbit and then the cops stage a hanging just ’cause. That’s not drama, that’s dark comedy. Tell yourself it’s a vaudeville act called “The Bowery Boys” before you press play, and somehow all those pesky problems might just disappear. You’re welcome! FL
