"Gangs of New York"

Characters come and go, introduced for reasons that you think will be explained later but never quite are, forlorn Chekhovian guns aching to be fired. John C. Reilly is a scrappy Rabbit in 1846, and by 1863 he has sold out to the folks in power to become a cop. This transformation could have been interesting if it had been even halfway explored, but Reilly's character seems to exist just so Scorsese can kill him off to make a point. And I wanted more of David Hemmings, as the figurehead of New York's über-aristocratic Schermerhorn family, and his fabulous eyebrows (they're peaks of fur teased up and out like Alpine ski jumps). But he seems to be present in the story only for his, well, eyebrows.

In fact, the best actors in "Gangs of New York" -- among them Brendan Gleeson, as a brassy, ballsy barber-turned-politician -- have the least to do. With the exception of Cameron Diaz, who holds tight as a saucy, scrappy pickpocket (and Amsterdam's love interest), most of the performers seem dwarfed by the wilderness of scenery. DiCaprio stumbles through the movie like a lost boy, occasionally frowning to signify his intense need for retribution and acceptance from Bill, but otherwise giving us nothing to read in his character.

And although Day-Lewis' performance has already won awards from several critics' groups, I confess that it baffled me -- and he's an actor whose work I have loved almost without qualification. Day-Lewis is visually quite grand, almost like a circus figure -- Powell has dressed him in slim waistcoats and long checkered trousers that make him look like a stilt walker. And I guess you could argue that his curlicue handlebar mustache gives him an air of grand, comic-book heroism.

But does he have to look so much like the guy on the pizza box? Day-Lewis seems to intentionally overplay Bill, sending him up the flagpole with a wink and a flourish. He shows an excellent aptitude for twinkling with his one good eye. (The other one is glass, with an iris shaped like a super-symbolic flying eagle -- leave it to Scorsese to give a character a fake eye that's as carefully crafted as a Milanese paperweight.)

Day-Lewis enunciates his lines in a strange Noo Yawk accent thick with East River mud; his weird diction may have some historical significance or it may be a creative invention. But either way, even in his biggest and most serious scenes, his choices feel mannered and goofy, as if he felt it was his responsibility to keep the whole movie whirling like a pie plate on a stick.

It must be very difficult, if not impossible, for an actor to have a sense of the scale of a movie while he's actually working on it. Could it be that Day-Lewis knew intuitively that his performance, and his character, had to be jumbo-sized to stand up to Scorsese's giant landscape?

But the final and biggest question is one that doesn't have a clear answer: Why was Scorsese driven to make such a gigantic movie in the first place? Scorsese has made big movies before, but they were a different sort of epic: "The Last Temptation of Christ" was the work of a man who loves stories and the pageantry of religion (possibly in that order), and also of one who realizes that to deprive any man, even Jesus Christ, of his humanity is the gravest offense. And "Kundun," which, for my money, is Scorsese's best and most beautiful picture, wasn't just a movie about Buddhism -- it was a Buddhist movie, infused with calm from the inside out.

"Gangs of New York" is a different kind of religious movie for Scorsese. He is still, and always will be, in thrall to embroidered tall tales, to bloody battles fought with a sense of purpose, to characters who live and act as if they know they're destined to become legends. It's tempting to conclude that Scorsese made "Gangs of New York" so outsized simply because he's a megalomaniac. But I don't see evidence of that at all. Ungainly and ineffectual as "Gangs of New York" is, I don't think you can watch it and fail to see that Scorsese longs for a grandness that eludes his reach.

Yet I believe he wants that grandness more for the glory of movies themselves as an art form, and less for himself. He wants movies so big he can climb inside them; he actually prefers to be smaller in comparison, because he knows that there are few greater pleasures of movie going than to be overwhelmed and awed. A misguided Jonah of modern filmmaking, he yearns to be swallowed up by scale. Perhaps he never thought his clumsy giant would run off without him.

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