"Gangs of New York"

"Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes" in Martin Scorsese's overlarge, overcooked epic of 19th century Manhattan. You should see it anyway.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Dec 20, 2002 | The world needs more filmmakers with passionate enthusiasms like Martin Scorsese. But it doesn't need "Gangs of New York." Imaginative and wholly unbelievable, "Gangs of New York" seems too big for any screen it could possibly be projected onto; it spills and sprawls off the margins, and you can imagine whole panoramic worlds outside the frame, worlds in which extras hired at union wages walk down cobbled streets, pick some pockets, toss back a few drinks -- invisible symbols of the movie's commitment to absolute authenticity.

But at some point you have to stop building a world and start telling a story, and in "Gangs of New York," Scorsese is so distracted and dazzled by his homemade universe he just can't seem to hunker down. The narrative is gangly and unfocused even though, naturally, the story is what drew him to make the picture in the first place: According to lore, Scorsese picked up "Gangs of New York," Herbert Asbury's 1928 chronicle of old New York, while he was housesitting in 1970 and devoured it in practically one day. He loved the way Asbury captured the history and the aura of the young city, and particularly the antics of its underworld criminals. It was a story not just of New York, but of America's wild beginnings.

By now the story behind the making of "Gangs of New York" -- the delays and the battles, the bickering and tinkering -- has become folklore itself. And you do have to wonder: What might happen to a man who clings to a book for 30 years, hoping to make it into a movie? Would it be all that surprising if his tenacity were to fuse into petrified obsessiveness? And couldn't simple ambition evolve into a kind of completist frenzy, an intricate maze with no clear way out?

Up to a point, you have to have some sympathy for Scorsese and his outlandish vision. But who knows exactly why "Gangs of New York" turned out as it did? This faux history lesson, which opens in the New York of 1846 and hopscotches neatly to 1863, is more oppressive than exhilarating. It's weighed down by its massive, dusty-bright sets -- built completely, Mad King Ludwig style, at Cinecittà in Rome -- and by its hordes of old New Yorkers, going about their business of knife sharpening, gambling and petty thievery while swaddled in vaguely futuristic garb. (At first I couldn't be sure if the clothing, designed by costume genius Sandy Powell, was brilliant or just jarringly odd, but I eventually settled on the former -- her stovepipe hats and loopy mix of prints register as a kind of rocket-ship Victoriana.)

The look of "Gangs of New York" is impressive, and yet it makes only the most oblique kind of sense. Scorsese's old New York doesn't look much like what we've seen in photographs of the era, but then, he never set out for textbook authenticity. He once said he was going for a western-on-Mars vibe, but what he gets is more like "Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes." Many of the movie's impoverished immigrants are stationed in a decrepit tenement with the front cut away, dollhouse-style. The interior is all raw wood and dusty caverns, the sort of thing you might see in an old "Star Trek" episode about a distant planet populated by oppressed masses whose tyrannical rulers prevent them from inventing things like running water and light bulbs.

But you have to say this much for Scorsese's decrepit magic kingdom: It sure is big. I think it's entirely possible to be so flummoxed by the look of "Gangs of New York" (as even Scorsese himself seems to be) that you forget to pay attention to the story altogether -- the movie was shot by Michael Ballhaus with a magisterial authority, as if the camera can't believe what it's seeing any more than we can. But eventually we're forced to wrestle with the tale Scorsese is hell-bent on telling, and with his notions of American identity as a crusty prize born of bloodshed.

"Gangs of New York" opens with a battle, or rather, with the vision of a ragtag group of Irish immigrants readying themselves for battle, sharpening their crude weapons and chomping with fierce determination on consecrated bread. They're called the Dead Rabbits -- Ye shall know them by the droopy pelts swinging from the tips of their spears -- and they're led by Liam Neeson as Priest Vallon, a noble warrior type who stands straight and tall as a slender oak.

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