Martin Scorsese
Gangs of New York

I don't think it's essential to understand whether violence in 19th century New York was truly as widespread and extreme as depicted. With Gangs of New York, Scorsese advances a discourse on violence that encompasses the entire history of America, and it should not be read merely as a precise historical reconstruction, but rather as an all-encompassing symbolic representation. 1846 or 1862 New York represents, in a certain sense, also the New York of 1950 or 2000; or better yet, America. Scorsese aims to depict a world, a way of living and building a nation: as Paul Thomas Anderson will do a few years later with There Will Be Blood, Scorsese tells us about an America that lives and feeds on violence, that grows and strengthens by adhering to the principles that Bill the Butcher so aptly explains: essentially, the law of the strongest.

Is there a will to accuse and denounce in this representation? Certainly, to some extent, but the director doesn't stop there. Criticism and acceptance co-exist in a decidedly balanced manner: America has blood-stained hands, but those hands have built a nation, have also worked and brought wealth. This key to interpretation is evident from two elements. On the one hand, there is the magnificent figure of the butcher, splendidly embodied by Daniel Day-Lewis: he is the emblem of the violence of the natives, yet he is a leader for many, carrying forward strong values of honor and pride. Indeed, legality is not a key element in his worldview, but surely his leadership is an inspiration to many young inexperienced lads, such as Amsterdam Vallon.

The other element that highlights the partial acceptance of violence for a greater good is purely stylistic: blood, battles, killings, and so on are not told in a tragic way, but rather with an epic filter that alternates with an almost caricatural one: mercy towards the victims is almost never perceived; they are rendered nearly as mannequins (almost slapstick style at times) dying because it needs to happen. As in epics, soldiers fall in droves; it is inevitable that it happens this way; the narrator's gaze empathizes only with that of the two great protagonists.

This style is maximized in the initial battle, which indeed must serve a mythological function for the rest of the film. The epic of the epic thus could only be overly emphatic, stylized, exaggerated far beyond the realistic. In the subsequent phases, the style alternates ordinary narrative moments with reprises of this emphasis, also through the photography that favors red and dark tones.

Violence that therefore can never be entirely judged from a moralistic standpoint, as it represents a now mythical past. Other moments, however, are subject to moral judgment: particularly the final one, where the government intervenes with heavy weaponry in the conflict between natives and immigrants. There, indeed, violence is condemnable; in that case, Scorsese shifts to a more melancholic and accusatory style for all those dead, aside from the war casualties (see the list of the fallen in the newspaper). To be clear, even the butcher is sometimes portrayed as a demon: for instance, when he responds to political dialogue with the use of his cleaver. But the ultimate judgment is not of total condemnation, as it will be instead for the oilman (again impersonated by the Mephistophelian Day-Lewis): let's say that the butcher is merely the symbol, the personification of a mentality, so a judgment on his actions balanced between good and evil is not that important. It would be like frowning upon the killings of an epic hero. His morality is internal to the world of violence and is based on pride and respectability. For him, a world without rivers of blood does not exist.

In a film that is nonetheless tumultuous and at times disordered, the use of symbols is fundamental for creating some order. Medallions, knives, hats, paintings: they serve to keep certain decisive references for narrating the central story, to prevent it from getting lost in the sketched social fresco. The latter is remarkable and technically impressive, as is easy to notice. Scorsese, in the goodness of the overall operation, however, shows a certain inability to synthesize: there are indeed many mass sequences in the streets, the brothels, the establishments. This ensures a notable gradation to the relational processes but also risks leading to a certain redundancy. The accumulation of similar sequences in their macroscopic traits risks becoming tedious. The ideas are numerous but not always well-distanced from the underlying commotion.

Despite some flaws, I nevertheless believe that Gangs of New York should be regarded as one of Scorsese's great works; not on par with the classics, but not far off. Perhaps something is missing even in the protagonists: if Day-Lewis is perfect, the same cannot be said for DiCaprio, still a bit unripe, and especially for the insipid Cameron Diaz.