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06/12/2002 - UK Telegraph -Scorsese's big gamble
The future of Martin Scorsese's $103 million movie Gangs of New York could have a huge impact on Hollywood. Mark Monahan catches the first screening
Any first look at a Martin Scorsese film is an event, but the first UK screening of Gangs of New York this week was a particularly charged affair. Twenty-five years in gestation, 160 minutes in length, with a $103 million price tag, this tale of gang wars in mid-19th-century New York has a staggering amount riding on it.
Not just for Martin Scorsese, who, at 60, has never won an Oscar, and whose last unalloyed masterpiece, Goodfellas, is now 12 years old; not just for Leonardo DiCaprio, whose career seemed to have sunk not long after 1997's Titanic; nor even just for Miramax, the studio behind it. More than all this, Gangs of New York could have a profound and lasting effect on the way Hollywood films are made.
This was brought home to me recently by the Australian director Phillip Noyce, who has had a splendid double triumph recently with Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American. We were discussing Apocalypse Now, which Noyce described as a film very much of the period "before the actors took over Hollywood, when directors were still kings".
He was bemoaning the fact that, nowadays, "a small coterie of so-called A-list actors have the most influence over what movies get made," and then made the following, remarkable statement: "We directors - probably most people in Hollywood - hope that Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York is a commercial as well as an artistic success, because our freedom depends on it."
If this all sounds self-serving (after all, Noyce himself is a director - why wouldn't he want more power?), it's worth remembering that the 1970s really were a glorious time for cinema. Coppola, Kubrick and Carpenter; Frankenheimer, Friedkin, and Roeg; Spielberg, Lucas and, indeed, Scorsese: these and a dozen others were delivering their finest work, largely because of the creative freedom they enjoyed.
It was a freedom that lasted only until such hugely expensive flops as Heaven's Gate and 1941, which made studios suddenly reluctant to hand blank cheques to maverick directors, and began to shift the balance of power.
And this is why Gangs of New York seems so important: if it triumphs, then its long, troubled shoot, nearly one-mile-long set, and the reported stand-offs between Scorsese and Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein will have all been worth it, and Hollywood studios may once again start cutting directors some welcome slack; if it fails, actors could rule the roost even more strongly than at present.
Having seen the movie, I'd say that it will do well to break even. Scorsese has spared no effort (or expense) in his recreation of New York as an ultraviolent maze of alleys dripping with lust and death, where gangs, police and even firemen are at each other's throats. The atmosphere is vivid, and there are several gripping passages (visceral fights, graceful pans, sweeping Steadicam shots) that could only be Scorsese's.
Nor are the performances at all bad. DiCaprio is convincing as Amsterdam Vallon, out to avenge the death of his Irish-born father (Liam Neeson) at the hands of rival, anti-immigrant gang leader Bill the Butcher. Cameron Diaz is a sexy, flame-haired pickpocket, and Daniel Day-Lewis, as Bill, is a treat. Eyes narrowed, magnificently moustached, and high as an over-hung pheasant, his is the presence that one craves on screen.
But the film doesn't gel. Scorsese's best work - Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas - has always had a serene fluency, but this feels both disjointed and burdened by a clunking earnestness. Maybe the original, 220-minute version allowed Scorsese time to fuse the drama and the history properly. But it had to come down, and much coherence appears to have been left on the cutting-room floor.
One can't help admiring Scorsese's ambition, and, if Noyce is right, it's hard not to wish Gangs of New York a degree of success. That said, if you had to rest the future of Hollywood on one film - or even on one Scorsese film - Gangs of New York would not be it.
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