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Arts and Media Gangs of New York Labor History, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2003 Arts and Media Gangs of New York DANIEL CZITROM The director dreamed of making the movie for decades; the studio spent over $100 million on a project completed two years behind schedule; the hype machine cranked out tales of endless script rewrites and bitter power struggles among the film makers. Historians kept their fingers crossed, hoping that one of the world’s premier movie auteurs would combine his artistic imagination, street savvy, and passion for history to produce that rarest of creatures: an epic drama that entertains a commercial audience while bringing history plausibly and intelligently to life. Could any film live up to these expectations? Probably not. But Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York disappoints both as drama and as historical vision, its flaws all the more glaring because of the enormous build-up. In October 2001, just a few weeks after the 9/11 catastrophe, Scorsese appeared at a special session devoted to his work-in- progress at the first ever conference on New York City history, held at the CUNY Graduate Center. Underneath the production anecdotes and the breezy banter, one sensed Scorsese’s strong desire to be taken seriously by the hundreds of historians and other scholars who packed the auditorium. When the lights dimmed and he began showing a few scenes from the rough cut the audience let out a collective gasp—the sound of having its breath taken away by the movie’s extraordinary look. It was hard to make much sense of these clips, but the world of New York’s Five Points in the 1850s appeared so lovingly and carefully recreated that one could practically smell the offal, taste the stale beer, and feel the tense ethnic hatred hanging over the streets like the worst August humidity. The Five Points set is the real star of this movie. Shot in the sprawling Cinecitta studios in Rome, the film evidently spared no expense in recreating the dismal tenements, filthy streets, and period clothing of America’s first and worst urban slum. By eschewing computer generated imagery Scorsese harks back to the old-school Hollywood tradition of directors like Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith, who placed a premium on bringing “realistic” physical spectacle to the screen. Unfortunately, there is little else in the film that can stand up to the amazing re-creation of the Points neighborhood. Too bad more money (and thought) did not go into the story and the script. The basic plot is simple enough. The film opens on a wintry day in 1846 as an alliance of Irish street gangs led by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) prepare to do battle with their nativist enemies, led by Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). As imagined by Scorsese, the gang fight is almost hallucinatory in its violence (think Braveheart meets Mean Streets, set in 19th century Manhattan) and at its climax, Vallon’s young son witnesses his father’s death at the hands of the Butcher. The film then flashes forward 16 years. Vallon’s son, the absurdly named Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio), now grown and just out of an orphanage, returns to the Points ISSN 0023-656X print/ISSN 1469-9702 online/03/030301-04 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/002365603200012900 302 Daniel Czitrom determined to avenge his father. The Butcher has become an influential power broker and Amsterdam insinuates himself into his inner circle, gaining his trust while waiting for his moment of retribution. Along the way Amsterdam becomes smitten with the streetwise pickpocket and casual prostitute Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a former paramour of Bill the Butcher. Scorsese situates the doings of this triangle within a wide scope of contemporary historical characters and conflicts: the mutual Catholic– Protestant hatred that shaped so much of New York’s politics and social life; the nascent machine politics of the Democratic party, embodied by William “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent), with its deep but always unstable connections to the city’s vice economy; the emergent commercial culture of blackface minstrelsy and variety shows; the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic Church and street gangs, two institutions strengthened and reshaped by the mass emigration of famine Irish; the nation’s first ever military draft, which made reluctant soldiers of tens of thousands of working class New Yorkers. The climactic street battle between Amsterdam and the Butcher takes place amidst the smoke, fire, blood, and hellish confusion of the Draft Riots of July 1863, the worst civil insurrection in American history. Amsterdam and Jenny are bland characters. Since they undergo no dramatic devel- opment and strike no erotic sparks, it’s hard to care what happens to them. It’s easy to ascribe this to the limits of DiCaprio and Diaz as actors, but a painfully weak script is the real culprit. For example, Jim Broadbent is enormously talented but, hobbled by stilted, often laughable dialogue, his Boss Tweed never rises above the level of caricature. It’s as if Thomas Nast’s famous cartoons had jumped from the pages of Harpers Weekly to the screen. Lewis has received much praise for his energetic portrayal of Bill the Butcher, and he is the only actor who manages to breathe life into his character. Even so, his mocking tone, mustache twirling, and intense physicality evoke a villain from a 19th century stage melodrama, threatening to foreclose on the mortgage. This was the era when a melange of Irish immigrants, free blacks, construc- tion workers, and longshoremen collectively created the ur-New York accent, and Lewis makes an imaginative, if exaggerated, effort to deliver his lines through it. But he’s the only actor to do so, reinforcing the weird sense that he is performing in a different film from everyone else. As drama, Gangs of New York goes badly off track. To be sure, Scorsese conjures up several eerily beautiful set pieces, and some of these images linger long after one leaves the theater: Irish gangs marching to the staccato beat of a snare drum through an underground tenement maze; the massing of frightened Catholic parishioners in front of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street; fresh Union recruits shipping off to war against the background of hundreds of coffins getting unloaded from boats; a sensuous, free-form dance, performed to street music by an African American sailor embodying the creole cultural forms the city had begun to produce. But the story itself never gains any momentum, never draws us in, even at its climax. Has there ever been a more dramatic event in New York’s—or America’s—history than the Draft Riots? There are a few quick and effective shots, like the smashing of the Provost Marshal’s office by the Black Joke fire company that set off the riot, or the attacks on wealthy men caught in the street. But overall Scorsese’s version of those awesome and rageful July days is confusing and ahistorical. We see the class anger provoked by the draft’s provision that allowed purchase of a “substitute” for $300. But we get no sense of how and why so many working class whites reviled African Americans as the most visible symbol of the war and its hated draft. Scorsese pays virtually no attention to the riots as an anti-black pogrom or the racist hatred that inflamed rioters to shoot, lynch, and mutilate as many Gangs of New York 303 black New Yorkers as they could lay their hands on. Even the attempts at dramatic embellishment fall flat. The film shows Union warships bombarding the Points from the harbor to help quell the riot—this never happened. Why make that sort of thing up when the truth would bring far more effective drama to the screen? Why not show, for example, the Union artillery batteries, fresh from Gettysburg, that fired directly into rioters, or the small groups of New York police that waded into huge crowds with discipline, courage, and thick locust clubs? One expects the climactic riot to bring together the film’s major characters, to give us multiple perspectives on the events. Perhaps the much publicized cuts forced upon Scorsese by the Miramax producers eviscerated a more nuanced and fuller depiction of the Draft Riots. And maybe we will see it one day in the inevitable “director’s cut” on DVD. Until then, the documentary account of the Draft Riots in Ric Burns’s 1999 PBS New York series provides more compelling drama (not to mention historical accuracy) than this feature film version. To understand what went wrong one must consider the movie’s source material, Herbert Asbury’s 1928 pulp history classic, The Gangs of New York. For decades it has remained arguably the most widely read and quoted source for New York history, and the release of the film has put it back on the best seller list. But Asbury’s book provides a badly flawed foundation that cannot support Scorsese’s grand ambitions. An enter- taining and informal historical tour through selected aspects of the city’s underworld, Asbury’s book owed a great deal to the “secrets of the great city” tradition of New York guidebooks, a genre that both reflected and amplified the intense anti-urban currents running through American culture. Like its countless 19th century predecessors, it is largely a result of cut-and-paste, cobbling, and plagiarism. Asbury relied almost exclusively on newspaper morgue files for his “research” to produce a book with narrative verve, colorful detail, and vivid character portraits—in short, a fun read.
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