Despite the fact I am a big fan of Martin Scorsese’s work, I hadn’t seen Gangs of New York before. I chalk that up to not seeing as many movies then as I do now, plus at the time, I had something of a distaste for Leonardo DiCaprio. I’ve since changed my mind on DiCaprio, and since the movie is on Netflix until the middle of the month, I might as well catch up on it.
Besides, I have a co-worker I chat movies with sometimes. He has big into history and historical accuracy, and he’s said he might have preferred Liam Neeson had played the title role in Lincoln, simply due to Neeson’s height, as opposed to Daniel Day-Lewis. I wonder if he knows Day-Lewis kills Neeson in the opening scene from this movie?
Gangs of New York tells a story that seems to be all too familiar even today. There’s conflict in the Five Points part of New York, a rather poor part of the city, in the middle of the 19th century between a Nativist gang led by Bill the Butcher Cutting (Day-Lewis) and an Irish Catholic mob led by Priest Vallon (Neeson), and Bill’s group doesn’t like immigrants much at all, urging anyone not born in America to go back where they came from. By Bill’s reckoning, his ancestors bled for the country during the Revolutionary War, and newcomers don’t have the right to be here. That said, his definition of “native” seems a wee bit flexible, but during the opening scene, the Nativists and Vallon’s “Dead Rabbits” gang come to blows in the streets of Five Points. Bill murders Vallon, and by the laws of the streets, the Dead Rabbits are disbanded. Vallon had a young son, and said son goes off to an orphanage.
Cut forward to about sixteen years later, and that son (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes out under the name Amsterdam with only one plan in mind: revenge for his father. He’s got a long way to go. There are a lot of gangs in 1860s New York, more immigrants flooding in every day, and a number of Priest Vallon’s old associates either retired from street crime or work in some capacity for Bill the Butcher, who likewise reports to Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent). And that’s not getting into any romantic complications that come from all-around thief Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), the only criminal in the entire neighborhood who doesn’t have to cough up tribute to Bill.
So, ultimately, this comes down to a very simple story: Amsterdam wants revenge, and he intends to somehow kill Bill the Butcher in the most public way possible to get it. But this is Scorcese, so there’s obviously more to it than that. While Bill the Butcher is a downright frightening man with a taste for violence used to getting his own way, there’s something to be said about focusing a movie like this on the city’s downtrodden. What few glimpses we get of the upper classes shows people even more callous than the various gangs running around the city. Immigrants may be getting off by the boatload, but the men are almost immediately signed up to fight for the Union in the Civil War. The white protestant population outright hates the city’s growing black and Catholic population, and even if Amsterdam prevails, does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? The city is growing and changing, with the last few shots of the movie showing just how little Bill or Priest Vallon really matter in the history of New York.
Furthermore, Day-Lewis gives Bill a bit of nuance. He does take a fatherly approach to Amsterdam when the lad initially pleases him (that being when he doesn’t really know where the kid came from), and he did raise an orphaned Jenny. Plus, he actually honors and respects Priest Vallon as a worthy foe, the last he’s seen in a long and violent life. He’s not a good man, but he is what the city made him to be, and the city ultimately doesn’t care about him. Draft riots put down by military units will cut down a gang war that happens to take place on the same day, and yes, a loose elephant does make for a surreal sight in such a setting, but somehow not totally inappropriate for the total anarchy of the film.
As for the performances, Day-Lewis is awesome, but that’s not exactly unexpected. It is a little odd that the Irishman plays the American antagonist while American Leo spends the movie with an Irish accent. Then again, Diaz’s Jenny speaks with an outright terrible Irish accent, a miscasting that doesn’t do the movie very many favors given how overstuffed it already is.
But this is Martin Scorsese doing what he does best: honor New York City and its history in all its violent, forgotten glory. This is a love letter to the poor of a forgotten era, one that shaped the city and the country in ways that they couldn’t imagine. While it is doubtful that the likes of Bill the Butcher could have stopped immigration to America, he does represent what is still an ongoing controversy over who does and does not have a right to be here.
Grade: B+
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