Meaner streets
Scorsese's epic misfire,Gangs of New York, draws blood.

By Dennis Harvey

IT CAN'T BE easy being Martin Scorsese, by critical consensus "America's greatest filmmaker," in an era when that title doesn't mean much. It must be hellish to wonder, over years and years, whether you've already peaked with the "formative" Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, or even 1968's Who's That Knocking at My Door?, each one a lightning bolt of hitherto unmapped urban surrealism and American personal-cinema ebullience. Outside Steven Spielberg, no one of his generation was so born to serve the medium. And Spielberg, who keeps getting both more interesting and more exasperating is too genuine a populist to imperil Scorsese's status as leading U.S. auteur.

All of which only make Gangs of New York sadder. It's a disaster – not even of the colorful kind that might reflect some idiosyncratic glory back on its maker, but a thwarted-epic mediocrity that suggests creative waffling and executive interference from shooting-day one. The conviction, the juice, went out of this movie so long ago that its rumors of editing-room struggle seem almost beside the point.

Gangs is an ordinarily bad movie in the tradition of another era, when no one expected studio historical epics to have authenticity, genuine star chemistry, an authorial stamp, or indeed anything beyond, well, just everything money can buy.

In its considerably more tragic way, Gangs is almost as generic an epic as Pearl Harbor, a movie that set out to be a painted-by-numbers, demographically risk-free "classic." Gangs ends up that way by default rather than design. It goes decisively wrong, right up front. The first reel manages to overestablish every ham-fisted motif, betray Scorsese's fatally desperate willingness to please, and build a lunatic air the subsequent two-and-a-half hours can never quite live down – all in one awful 20-minute prologue. A scrappy group of mostly Irish immigrants led by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) make its final stand against the bullying "natives" of crime boss Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) in the working-class Five Points district of 1846 New York City. They're horribly crushed, with Vallon's only child witnessing his father's death by the knife of the Butcher himself.

Ever inclined toward the operatic, Scorsese often composes scenes in musical terms, both theoretical and literal. This time that urge makes everything ludicrously larger-than-life. Gangs' establishing set piece comes off as a gaseous Stomp!-does-Riverdance self-parody hardly sobered by climactic gore. Feisty United Colors of Benetton CHUDs (the Eire-ish folk) rise a-sangin' from the depths of a bottomless factory-production design that screams, "Soundstage!" The good-versus-evil "dance" is so blunt it might well have been choreographed by Debbie Allen. And the score's quasi-Celtic kitsch (a genre long since tapped out by Titanic) only exacerbates all Broadway-goes-blockbuster absurdity.

A moment later Priest's now grown-up son, Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio), is sprung from 15 intervening years in juvie, determined to get revenge. But the flashbacks to that Riverdance slaughter commence immediately, should any audience dolt miss a whit of the script's anvil-weighted character motivations. He thus sucks up to an imperceptibly older Butcher, becoming the latter's beloved protégé as well as rival for the affections of beauteous pickpocket Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz). When found out, Amsterdam survives a severe punishment, revives his dad's tatty old oppositional "gang" flag, and mounts street war against the Butcher's entrenched, corrupted army.

Gangs wants to be so much: critique of this land-of-immigrants' xenophobia, paean to NYC's street-fighting roots, American class-struggle primer, heterosexual love story, father-son love story, buddy pic, bloody goosing of costume drama. Yet it all shows up on screen as awful composite cliché, when anything past faint intention registers at all.

So many scenes end in abrupt ellipses, as if the editorial process had at last simply been given up. What's left can't be what anyone intended. Did Jay Cocks want his screenplay glued together by DiCaprio's sporadic, emptily platitudinous narration ("The Earth turns, but we don't feel it move")? Who settled on having characters speak in banal, circa-2002 psychobabble terms such as "moral conundrum"? Or such camp stabs at 19th-century Sopranos slang as "Now you've tasted my mutton!" (when the Butcher cleaves a foe)?

No one distinguishes themselves here. Handlebar-mustachioed, checkered-trousers-hiked-to-flood-height, Day-Lewis suggests that extensive Method-style actorish planning can still go completely awry. DiCaprio is fortunate that simultaneous Catch Me If You Can keeps his flagging flame lit. Diaz likewise exposes herself as a limited talent helpless in the face of prestige-package stunt casting. How many good actors here – just to name a few, Jim Broadbent, Henry Thomas, John C. Reilly, and Brendan Gleeson – get so much less than they deserve?

Gangs is The Godfather: Part III or Once upon a Time in America, two other "last words" in American criminal mythology. Yet those earlier films each had vivid sequences, moments when intent overpowered deadline- or studio-imposed interference. Gangs has no such claim on even lighting-flash permanency. Overreaching yet routine on every level, Gangs suggests that being Martin Scorsese is a torment only a Pulitzer Prize might cure. Not yet, alas, not yet. 'Gangs of New York' opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, Film listings, for show times.