Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece with Leonardo di Caprio was filmed in Cinecittà. The structure of the film has been compared to Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo
New York, December 9, 2002. After the two apparently most eccentric titles of his vast filmography (“Kundun”, 1997; “Bringing Out the Dead”, 1999), Martin Scorsese presents a preview (the film was then distributed nationally from December 20, and by us on January 23, 2003) the blockbuster “Gangs of New York”: a project cherished (with the screenwriter Jay Cocks) since the early seventies, set in the America of late nineteenth century in the midst of the Civil War and based on a literary essay of 1928 (“The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld” by Herbert Asbury), who managed to see the light with difficulty only thanks to the encounter with the now infamous tycoon Harvey Weinstein (and then with Alberto Grimaldi). And that it had undergone all the hardships of the “cursed” works during its construction, above all due to its nature as a technically impervious blockbuster (its cost exceeded one hundred million dollars at the time, and was the highest budget ever managed by Scorsese up to that time) and the very strong contrasts between the director and the production.
The making of the fresco on the struggle between the armed gangs that dominated the New York district of Five Points in the 19th century (staged as a new symbolic emanation of Scorses’ over ten-year-old discourse on the disintegration of the boundaries between good and evil that began with “Mean Streets – Sunday in church, Monday in hell”, 1973, and concluded – perhaps – with “The Departed” , 2006) it was made almost entirely in Cinecittà, where “our” Dante Ferretti set up an endless set within which Scorsese, in an unprecedented dimension often closer to the theater than to the cinema, recreates his problematic “birth of a nation” by furiously amassing sounds and words, sequence bubbling and audacious and suspensions of rhythm, over-the-top actor performances and reflections on the Myth. And where the immense quantity of visual and textual material offered to the senses returned in each frame the measure of a mortuary representation of the end of Innocence and of the “dirtying” of purity to draw an annihilation of morality which is the then still fresh memory of the attacks of 9/11 laden with even more unpleasant symbolic shadows.
Simple in its basic line, but internally highly articulated, the narration of “Gangs of New York” focused on a feeling of revenge. In 1862, during the first phase of the Civil War, the young Irishman “Amsterdam” Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), fresh out of reform school, decides to avenge the death of his father “Priest” (Liam Neeson), killed sixteen years earlier by Mephistophelean Bill Cutting known as “the Butcher” (Daniel Day-Lewis), undisputed leader of the “Natives” gang in perpetual conflict with the New York pockets of Irish immigration of the “Dead Rabbits”. To carry out his plan, the boy wins his trust by transforming himself into a sort of adopted son of Bill, who does not suspect his true identity; but before their showdown (which took place in July 1863, during “Draft Week”, characterized by violent riots in Lower Manhattan by white working-class men against conscription and enlistment in the War) the secret of Amsterdam will come to the surface due to the jealousy of his friend Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas) for his partner, the thief Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz).
The dramatic structure of “Gangs of New York” is so archetypal that it has been juxtaposed (depending on the benevolence of the reviewers) to Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo; its scanning almost Dantesque, in the “screwed” measure of an inevitably infernal descent into the coils of history and of guilt. Scorsese pared the fold in a furious and dilated Steinbeckian cinematic assault (two hours and forty-seven minutes the final playing time, after the extremely tiring editing; but one is left with the feeling that an even greater length would have been needed) in which the purely cinematographic magnificence of the narration (the use of alternating editing, the irruption of flashbacks, the gigantism of crowd scenes and some long takes, the very elaborate lights of Michael Ballhaus) always acts as a counterpoint to a paradoxically “intimate” sensory dimension which, in the ostentatious exhibition of the artifice of reconstruction through the evident and underlined “materiality” of its eminently visual components (the graphic violence of flesh and blood, the sets deliberately perceptible as such to the detriment of the invisibility of the period reconstruction, exactly like the highly detailed costumes by Sandy Powell), takes on a darkly anti-realistic quality and functional to an ambivalent metaphorical discourse: the “political” one on the transition from chaos to “democracy” and the “aesthetic” one on the end of classic cinema at the dawn of a millennium which will definitively sanction the transformation of his own work ethic.
Casting fenomenale (beyond to the perfect Day-Lewis/DiCaprio/Diaz “triangle”. and the names already mentioned include excellent faces such as Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, David Hemmings, Brendan Gleeson, Eddie Marsan, Alec McCowen and Barbara Bouchet) and ten Oscar nominations (best film, direction, leading actor, screenplay -by Kenneth Lonergan, Steven Zaillian and Jay Cocks-, cinematography, set design, costumes, editing, sound and original song -“The Hands That Built America” by U2-). No nomination turned into a statuette. In hindsight, twenty years later, it wasn’t an injustice: just the confirmation of the otherness of a work distant from the taste of his time and perhaps of all time: like every right masterpiece that can (or should ) to be.
December 8, 2022 (change December 8, 2022 | 1:26 pm)
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