Gangs of New York

Dir. Martin Scorsese
2002
7.4


Watching Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York recently, I came to appreciate–rather belatedly I must admit–certain drawbacks to the now [in]famous auteur theory. Of course, the theory itself is meant to define a director as an author of a film by highlighting thematic and stylistic motifs from the his/her output. The goal was to realize authorial preeminence within an industrial process. The consequences of an academic theory that proffers solidarity with an artist only make themselves evident much further down the line, when aged auteurs are given greater credence than their upstart contemporaries. Gangs of New York plays like a study on the inborn flaws of auteurism. Foreshadowing the narcissistic debacle of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), Gangs is ultimately not a self contained historical epic but a Martin Scorsese Historical Epic.

Beginning a film with a vainglorious and highly orchestrated battle sequence that skews aestheticization of violence in favor of glorification via rapid editing and ill-advised, anachronistic score choice (not to be confused with the ironic audio visual juxtaposition of, for instance, Scorsese's own Mean Streets), exceeds the limitations of 'minor transgression'. It cheapens the sincerity of the entire enterprise. This imprudent tactic leaves Scorsese with a lot of ground to make up. Thankfully, the remainder of the film is rhythmically and tonally well tempered. A period drama about Irish immigrants in New York City during the mid-19th century, the film's script surreptitiously extracts dramatic plot points while moving gracefully through a compelling story. Scorsese's attention to surface details both broad and confined is simply extraordinary. His sets are towering marvels in particular the subterranean Irish tavern of the Five Points.

Scorsese has become well known for extracting memorable performances from his leads and Gangs is no exception. Daniel Day-Lewis' William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting anticipates the fire and brimstone of America's own Daniel Plainview in P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007). Cameron Diaz's Jenny Everdeane is one of Scorsese's strongest female characters and the director's most forceful indictment of the misogyny more than occasionally found in his own films. And of course there is Scorsese's muse, Leo. His understated performance as Amsterdam Vallon, the son of a slain Roman Catholic priest, stands quietly and thus all the more noticeably in the shadow of Day-Lewis' furious histrionics. The emotional territory he covers in Gangs (in particular, contradictory feelings of guilt and loyalty) would be covered again in Scorsese's magnificent The Departed (2006) but it is not the weight of the burden but the mode of coping that makes his restrained performance so affecting. His internal angst reveals itself seldom but the verisimilitude by which he conveys Vallon's psychological trauma lends his trajectory an undeniable sense of fatalism and gives his performance meaningful depth.

Then the problem is not within the superficial fabric of the film. With great performances, unparalleled art direction and a fine script, what is lacking in Gangs is found in the smallest but most unexpected errors of confidence. In particular, in two long time Scorsese collaborators: editor Thelma Schnoomaker and DP Michael Ballhaus. Both have worked with Scorsese since the 1980s and perhaps one can chock these mistakes up to hive mind mentality. Schoonmaker's editing on her first collaboration with Scorsese, Raging Bull, undoubtedly played a part in that film's critical success. In Gangs, her cutting is mostly appropriate but occasionally (as in the aforementioned battle scene) becomes an exercise in excess. Rapid alternations between POV and third person shots cause the action to be confounding and disorienting but hardly heighten the immediacy of the violence. Ballhaus' cinematography is practiced and patient. In one sublime sequence his camera outlines the entire existential journey many of the immigrant Irish will make: arriving in one boat, departing in another and finally arriving “home” in a third wooden vessel. His shots are well composed though his muted tonal palette, handsome as it is, seems calculated to meet the expectations of an American period drama. Furthermore, he occasionally injects a “Scorsese shot”, particularly favoring the dolly zoom most memorably used in Goodfellas. The technique is as tasteless here as it was brilliantly metaphysical in that film.

The fact that Gangs of New York comes embedded with Scorsesean calling cards does not render it defective but certainly has a pejorative effect. The problem is not with the motifs themselves. His ideological themes of masculinity, patriarchy, Catholic guilt and morality are adequately explored here as they are in many of his other features. However, despite the good faith by which he investigates these subjects, the sheer amount of material Scorsese attempts to cover even in a film of such girth, while incorporating ample amounts of romance and action, inevitably invites skepticism in regards to what could have been left on the cutting room floor. Scorsese's hamburger comes with everything on it effectively reducing the impact of individual flavors and textures. Each additional aspect obscures the subtleties of the others. Shifting the film's political agenda into high gear toward the finale eclipses the intricate underpinnings of the emotional relationships between the principle characters, especially Vallon and Cutting.

My last complaint is in regards to how, despite the sheer amount of creative intensity, Gangs of New York is in some ways sadly predictable. Everything about the film is entirely explicable. Scorsese opts for legend over myth and grounds his film in historical realism occasionally airing on the side of melodrama. Which is not a cinematic sin but does jive with the Scorsese's history of innovation and the film's tangible sense of self-importance. Gangs can be placed in a very broad category of historical dramas which attempt to place discrete relationships and intricate emotions, some of which are intrinsically linked to the time period, into a wider socio-political and historical context. The goal is to make the viewer aware of the likeness between what they are seeing in the “past” and what they live in their daily lives. Contemporary relevance in period films can often get over extended for the sake of viewer empathy. In doing so, some or all of the unique perspective of the time can be lost. Scorsese generally demands a lot and Gangs in particular is so saturated with detail and context that it very nearly alienates the viewer. There is much to enjoy in Gangs of New York. Still, it will never be a great film. For better or worse, it always be a Martin Scorsese film.

The Departed

Dir. Martin Scorsese
2006
9.3


Martin Scorsese is a man's director. In forty years he's nearly perfectly the mobster film, a genre more frequently avoided by women than war films or sci-fi movies. And you can easily see why: his mobster movies tend to conform to male stereotypes: an affinity for violence, sex, power, and essentially all the things the typical man is supposed to want as defined by the propaganda of consumerist culture, that we have furthermore accepted as truth. The mob itself is centered around a system of patriarchy: a system measured by male desire. This system states that a man who does not want anything is useless. The things mobsters pathologically desire become objectified. Sex, money, property, and respect all become means of measuring a man's greatness. Women in mobster films (including Scorsese's) are almost always on the peripheral. On occasion two men may fight over a women but it is not, generally speaking, because of some profound connection but rather an intrinsic need to assert dominance. In The Departed, Martin Scorsese's most rigorously taut and suspenseful film, the all-consuming “mob mentality” is profiled and defined with greater precision than ever before. Encased in what can only be called the best screenplay of the decade Scorsese unleashes a powerhouse of stars and, per usual, directs them to cinematic greatness. In the face of such a towering and enchanting success, it is easy to overlook his history of misogynistic film making and easier still to accept it as a term and condition of an exceptionally talented director.

One could argue that The Departed pointed to an elevation in Scorsese's consideration of women. However, the recurring motifs of sons, impotence and sexlessness, which could potentially be used to support this point, do more to increase the insecurity and fallibility of the principle male characters than to heighten the stature of the film's neglected females. In fact the film's only principle female role functions more as a meeting point for the film's two deceivers, and her character is flat and remotely lifeless. However, this is the only flat and lifeless portion of the film. Trying to summarize the film's plot would indeed be an unfortunate decision at this junction. With The Departed Scorsese unleashes a hail of details in conjunction with violent sensory overload (the often discontinuous diegetic system alone is brilliantly disconcerting) that literally leaves the viewer stunned. This is perhaps Scorsese showing his own form of dominance over a genre that he helped define and keep alive since the 1970s.

Though Scorsese does not adhere to standard thriller film levels of suspense and detail, he roughly maintains their ratio. Not only are the levels of plot detail and visual excitement simply extraordinary, Scorsese imbues his film with his own polished psychology theories. There is, of course, the symbiotic relationship of law and crime which is explored in most every “crime” movie, but rarely to such a degree. The film's recurrent “what's the difference?” theme (facing a loaded weapon, cui bono?, could I do murder?) finds deep roots in the Neitzchaen principle of moral superiority or “beyond good and evil.” Direct references are made to Freud, however they are more for emphasize on the undercurrent of philosophy pounding in the blood of this film rather than for intellectual vanity. Scorsese takes his film is so many exciting directions at once that it's hard to recognize, even after several viewings, what is actually stimulating you. The Departed marks the difference between a film that is too complicated and poorly handled and one that the viewer gets more out of every time they watch it. It's a difference that's difficult to quantify but William Monohan's screenplay masterfully fills every crevice of curiosity and follows each loose end to its respective conclusion. You get done watching The Departed and you don't scratch your head and go “Huh?”. Instead, you feel like you need to go lie down or take a walk. You feel like you've just finished something seriously involving although you've only been sitting on your couch. In short, it's exactly how a movie should make you feel.

Despite all his achievements both in The Departed and its predecessors, Scorsese has still not managed to completely level with women. To illustrate, think of The Departed's final sequences as sex. The phallic-pistol erupting, which here would represent the male orgasm and directorial climax, causes the death of Costigan (which the viewer has unknowingly been anticipating) and the voyeuristic peak of the viewer's (representative of women) climax as well. This moment would have been the perfect cinematic rendering of mutual pleasure between director and viewer, had not two more murders taken place within seconds of that initial one and one more just before the final credit sequence roles. These sequential murders become symbolic of selfish pleasure (taken on by the director) for which we feel very little. They feel vaguely excessive and cheap: a means of ushering the film's finale which, while not rushed, doesn't feel entirely appropriate. Perhaps its our ingrained sense of American, bureaucratic law and order that informs our conviction that someone should have been arrested, although our most basic and instinctual sense of justice is satisfied with the final death. Nevertheless, Scorsese is surely putting the finishing touches on a grotesque portrait of primal urges. In doing so, however, he almost involuntarily associates himself with the engendered and dealt-with flaws of the characters he portrays so brutally. The act is corrupted and dangerously indulgent. It exercises the same system of desire etched out by the mob itself. For a film so sophisticated its conclusion feels unnervingly primitive. Perhaps it is best to conclude by saying that even a film as well thought out and executed as The Departed still cannot help but give insight into the mind of the man behind it.