Gangs of New York. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan based on the book by Herbert Asbury. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, and Brendan Gleeson. A Miramax Films release (168 minutes). Opens Friday at the Flagship, Jane Pickens, Providence Place Mall 16, and Showcase cinemas.

Once American cinema's greatest realist, Martin Scorsese has become its greatest cartoonist. Based nominally on Herbert Asbury's anecdotal, muckraking 1928 history, his Gangs of New York aspires less to mentors Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica than to Chuck Avery and Max Fleischer, with more than a nod to George Miller of Mad Max fame. Replacing most attempts at historical accuracy (Scorsese claims that he dreamed for years of adapting this book, but in the film he almost entirely disregards it) with operatic caricatures might not have been a mistake had the director also discarded his pretenses to mythmaking and embraced instead the comic-book nonsense as a guilty and expensive pleasure.

The tone of Catholic guilt and high seriousness sets in at once as Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) initiates his only son, Amsterdam, into the mysteries of macho sado-masochism with a mild blood rite that has sacramental overtones. Vallon heads the Irish gang the Dead Rabbits, who along with allied bands are preparing for battle against the Native Americans, the army of jingoistic local yokels led by Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis), a neighborhood warlord with notions of political power and ethnic cleansing. An establishing shot (zooming in apparently from the space shuttle) and a helpful title card let us know that it's "New York City, 1846."

In fact, it's obviously a movie set that cost Harvey Weinstein a small fortune. Built about 5000 miles from Manhattan (in Rome's Cinecittà), it suggests more a staging of Annie than the brutal squalor of the Five Points slum of a century and a half ago. The colorful gangs, armed with whimsical makeshift knobby cudgels, edged weapons, filed teeth, and spiked footwear (no firearms), bear names from the Asbury source -- the Plug Uglies, the Shirt Tails, the Bowery Boys -- but wear costumes reminiscent of Walter Hill's The Warriors. The climactic clash, like some WWF event multiplied by a thousand, ends with Bill ruefully caressing Priest Vallon's face before cutting out his heart, and young Amsterdam fleeing the scene only to return 15 years later as Leonardo DiCaprio with a bogus tale of revenge, Oedipal confusion, and male bonding to unfold.

That story -- which involves Amsterdam's ingratiating himself incognito into Bill's good graces, rising through the ranks, becoming his second-in-command, sleeping with his girlfriend Jenny (Cameron Diaz with red hair, a scar, and an erratic brogue), and plotting his demise, all narrated in voiceover in DiCaprio's insipid Irish accent -- seems beside the point in light of Day Lewis's performance. He's the biggest Toon of all, decked out in a Cat In the Hat-sized stovepipe and a walrus moustache big enough to hang it on. More important, he's inspired with an antic, logorrheic subversiveness that brings out the same in Scorsese. True to his name, Day Lewis's Butcher slices through the baloney, his anarchic fury and sardonic asides cutting short the film's worst indulgences in sentiment and self-importance. When a character unloads a gas cloud of platitudes and circumlocutions, Bill clears the air by hilariously asking, "What in heaven's name are you talking about?"

Too bad the question wasn't directed at Scorsese himself. To his credit, Gangs does struggle to give historical reality to the themes of male rage and ineffectuality, tribal dislocation, cultural conflict, and religious recidivism that he made so vivid and precise in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and GoodFellas. For half of its 168 minutes, the film does wed its generic tale to the conflict between the established powers and the wave of immigration shaping America at the time, with Jim Broadbent providing the appropriate note of genial corruption as Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall. But the moment the shillelagh-wielding Monk (Brendan Gleeson) notes how "Shakespearean" Amsterdam's little melodrama is shaping up, history and artifice part company. The film's showstopping finale, a re-creation of the 1863 Draft Riots, one of America's most shameful disasters, arrives almost as if from a separate movie, and it's tangential and irrelevant to the so-called dramatic climax, which is a dreary rematch of the film's opening bout.

Had Scorsese shown the genius and daring he's capable of, had he confronted and probed the contradictions, ambiguities, and troubling truths of this period (if a voiceover is needed, why not one from the Butcher?), he might have made a truly great film. He might have achieved what Coppola tried to with Apocalypse Now. Instead he's mounted a decadent diversion, a compromised, bloated comic strip that suggests his age of movie innocence is over.

Issue Date: December 20 - 26, 2002