Also this issue:

Jack's Back
The caustic About Schmidt showcases Jack Nicholson’s greatest performance in decades.
-Sam Adams

Straight to the Points
The Two Towers cuts to the chase.
-Sam Adams

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Life, art and fantasy get jumbled up in Adaptation.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

December 19-25, 2002

movies

Gunga Din

âStache Boom Bang: Daniel Day-Lewis fights to enunciate through his lip fuzz.

Gangs of New York is an epic so noisy you can't hear a thing.

by Sam Adams

Either Martin Scorsese has lost his taste for the small gesture, or else the arduous yearlong editing process for Gangs of New York has beat it out of him. Even operas need their recitatives, and Gangs is all arias. Scorsese's tale of New York City in the mid-1800s begins, shockingly enough, in a dank, oil-lit warren of ramps and tunnels that looks like a West Virginia coal mine, then moves out into a snow-strewn town square that's straight out of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. As it turns out, they're both located in the Five Points, what today is part of Manhattan, but here is frontier country ruled by murderous, warring factions whose brutality is equalled only by their vocabulary. ("I don't give a tuppeny fuck for your moral conundrum, you shit-headed meatsack" is but one particularly fragrant example.) That snowy opening confrontation sets the anti-immigrant Natives, led by the mustachioed, cleaver-wielding Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), against the Irish Dead Rabbits, lead by by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), who's fond of dispatching his prey with a weighty iron crucifix. Throats are slashed, guts torn open, cheeks are ripped through (a particularly disgusting maneuver known as a "fishhook"), and at the end, Vallon lies bleeding to death in the snow. Bill proclaims him a worthy opponent, therefore instructing none of his band to cut off the dead man's ears as a trophy.

Big softie that he is, Bill the Butcher spares Vallon's son, who grows up to be a goateed Leonardo DiCaprio, bent on revenging his dead father. Navigating the Five Points isn't easy, though; where there aren't gangs, corrupt cops (like the be-brogued John C. Reilly) rule the roost, themselves little more than uniformed street gangs. When Bill complains to the legendarily corrupt Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) that a boxing match he paid good money to protect has been busted by the police, Tweed shrugs, "That was the municipal police. This is the metropolitan police."

Filmed on soundstages in Rome, Gangs of New York draws on the legacy of Visconti and Leone. Scorsese's Civil War-era New York is a somersault of images, a battleground where even fire brigades are as likely to fight each other as fires. Trouble is, such a world requires characters of similar size, and rather than cast two titans, Scorsese uses a ham and a mouse, apparently hoping they'll balance each other out. Day-Lewis' Bill adopts a nasal bark of comical intensity, while, chin fuzz notwithstanding, DiCaprio is nowhere near convincing as a street tough with murder on his mind. Scorsese tries to soup up the action, stooping to techniques that hacks invented trying to imitate him (the use of AVID-spawned digital undercranking is particularly disheartening), but Gangs is all hue and no cry, like West Side Story without the songs.

Gangs of New York, Directed by Martin Scorsese, A Miramax release, Opens Friday at area theaters