By Michele Marr of the LA Times A few weeks ago I finally saw the movie "Gangs of New York." I had put off seeing it because I don't handle viewing brutality and gore well. It usually drives me to the soda and gum-sticky refuge of the theater floor. But at home, with the reassurance of the skip button of a DVD, I took the risk. Not a few critics panned Scorcese's film for being flawed and even tedious. Film critic Joshua Tyler called it "an unapologetic mess, whose only saving grace is that it ends by blowing just about everything up." I was transfixed. In spite of the violence, or maybe partly because of it, watching "Gangs of New York" was like viewing the present through a lens of the past, which I think may be why Scorcese — who had wanted to make this movie for 30 years — was himself so fascinated with Herbert Asbury's book on which the movie is based. The story is set in mid-19th century New York, Manhattan's Lower East Side, in a neighborhood known as Five Points, during the Civil War. Hollywood describes it as "the story of a young man seeking revenge against the powerful gang leader who killed his father," and that it is, but it's so much more. It's a tangle of stories, told from the vantage of hindsight. There are noble ambitions (Boss Tweed's vision of a city with decent infrastructure and municipal services) born of self-serving motivations and wrought by vile means (Gang boss Bill the Butcher's brutal oppression of a neighborhood mired in the worst poverty). There are urban turf wars (nativist, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants against newly-immigrated Irish Catholics) overshadowed by the Civil War. There is the story of the first U.S. draft, which allowed those who could to buy their exemption with a payment of $300. For the poor in Five Points, it may as well have been $300 million. There is, too, the story of the New York draft riots, which rose up at this injustice to be suppressed days later by the Federal Army but not before it took an estimated 100 lives, several of them lynchings of newly-freed slaves. The movie's end is poignant. Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Amsterdam Vallon, the young man who sought revenge against Bill the Butcher, who killed his father, stands in a graveyard across from the smoky rubble that just days ago was Five Points — what will, in time, become the New York skyline. "Friend or foe," he says, "it didn't make no difference now. It was four days and nights until the worst of the mob was finally put down.... My father told me we was all born of blood and tribulation. And so, then too, was our great city. But for those of us what lived and died in them furious days it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away. And, no matter what they did to build this city up again, for the rest of time it would be like no one even knew we was ever here." As he speaks, the New York skyline changes behind him until he stands against a skyline that includes the World Trade Center twin towers. Sometime during this summer I read a story about actress and artist Rose Portillo. When asked about mosaics she had created, she said, "You go through the rubble and pick through it and make something out of it." |
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