"Remember the first rule of politics. The ballots don't make the results; the counters make the results. The counters. Keep counting."
Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent)
"Gangs of New York," which premiered on this day in 2002, can be a difficult movie to watch. Apparently, it was also a difficult film to make. Costs overran the budget by 25%, ballooning to over $100 million.
It opened with hand–to–hand battle in the snow in the infamous 19th–century gang fight of Five Points between the Protestant "Natives" and the Irish Catholic "Dead Rabbits," a fight "recorded in American history," wrote Roger Ebert, "but not underlined."
I don't know what the actual battle was like, but the movie depiction was grim. The combatants went at each other with clubs and hatchets, leaving red stains on the carpet of snow beneath them.
Actually, grim is a good word for "Gangs of New York."
It was a rough movie, full of violence and bloodshed.
Ebert acknowledged the film was a "triumph" for director Martin Scorsese "and yet I do not think this film is in the first rank of his masterpieces. It is very good but not great," he wrote.
"Scorsese's films usually leap joyfully onto the screen, the work of a master in command of his craft," Ebert continued. "Here there seems more struggle, more weight to overcome, more darkness. It is a story that Scorsese has filmed without entirely internalizing. The gangsters in his earlier films are motivated by greed, ego and power; they like nice cars, shoes, suits, dinners, women. They murder as a cost of doing business. The characters in 'Gangs of New York' kill because they like to and want to. They are bloodthirsty and motivated by hate. I think Scorsese liked the heroes of 'Goodfellas,' 'Casino' and 'Mean Streets,' but I'm not sure he likes this crowd."
Granted, there really wasn't a whole lot to like, but there were some worthwhile observations to be made.
For example, Ebert pointed out that the movie was loaded with Dickensian characters, and he compared the hero of the story, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, only five years removed from his heartthrob role in "Titanic," to David Copperfield or Oliver Twist. I had to wonder how the young girls who had flocked to theaters over and over again to see DiCaprio in "Titanic" felt when they saw Daniel Day–Lewis put a hot knife on DiCaprio's cheek, disfiguring his character. It was, to be sure, a different kind of role.
And Cameron Diaz, who played as volatile a love interest as the screen has ever seen, was compared to Nancy in Dickens' "Oliver Twist." Diaz was "a hellcat with a fierce loyalty to her man," Ebert wrote — not unlike Shani Wallis in "Oliver!" several decades before.
The movie also gave an unflinching look at democracy in America in the 19th century.
In 19th–century New York, that often meant the buying and selling of votes and the delivering of constituencies like lambs to a slaughter. Given the subject matter of the movie, that is probably a pretty good analogy.
"Gangs of New York" received 10 Oscar nominations but didn't win a single award.
