It's all about balance, of course, and Rosenbaum may have hit that particular nail on the head for all I know, but I'm even keener to see the film now than I was half an hour ago.What's your take? Cheers, Rob.
I haven't seen it yet, but plan to. In any case, here's something that John Cox posted to Marxmail in response to Rosenbaum's review:
Two somewhat conflicting appraisals of Scorcese's new film -- the first is from today's NYTimes, and is the most favorable review I've seen yet; the second is from the latest New Yorker, and directly takes up the question Louis raised about Scorcese's treatment of the 1863 Draft Riots. Like everyone else, other than professional reviewers, I haven't seen it yet -
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"Gangs of New York" is an important film as well as an entertaining one. With this project, Mr. Scorsese has made his passionate ethnographic sensibility the vehicle of an especially grand ambition. He wants not only to reconstruct the details of life in a distant era but to construct, from the ground up, a narrative of historical change, to explain how we - New Yorkers, Americans, modern folk who disdain hand-to-hand bloodletting and overt displays of corruption - got from there to here, how the ancient laws gave way to modern ones.
Such an ambition is rare in American movies, and rarer still is the sense of tragedy and contradiction that Mr. Scorsese brings to his saga. There is very little in the history of American cinema to prepare us for the version of American history Mr. Scorsese presents here. It is not the usual triumphalist story of moral progress and enlightenment, but rather a blood-soaked revenger's tale, in which the modern world arrives in the form of a line of soldiers firing into a crowd.
The director's great accomplishment, the result of three decades of mulling and research inspired by Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York" - a 1928 book nearly as legendary as the world it illuminates - has been to bring to life not only the texture of the past but its force and velocity as well. For all its meticulously imagined costumes and sets (for which the production designer, Dante Ferretti, surely deserves an Oscar), this is no costume drama.
It is informed not by the polite antiquarianism of Merchant and Ivory but by the political ardor of someone like Luchino Visconti, one of Mr. Scorsese's heroes. "Senso," Visconti's lavish 1953 melodrama set during the Italian Risorgimento (and his first color film), is one of the touchstones of "My Voyage to Italy," Mr. Scorsese's fascinating, quasi-autobiographical documuntaby on postwar Italian cinema.
Though "Gangs of New York" throws in its lot with the rabble rather than the aristocracy, it shares with "Senso" (and also with "The Leopard," Visconti's 1965 masterpiece) a feeling that the past, so full of ambiguity and complexity, of barbarism and nobility, continues to send its aftershocks into the present. It shows us a world on the brink of vanishing and manages to mourn that world without doubting the inevitability or the justice of its fate.
"America was born in the streets," the posters for "Gangs" proclaim. Later, Amsterdam Vallon, in the aftermath of the draft riots, muses that "our great city was born in blood and tribulation." Nobody as steeped in film history as Mr. Scorsese could offer such a metaphor without conjuring the memory of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," and Griffith, along with John Ford and others, is one of the targets of Mr. Scorsese's revisionism.
In Griffith's film, adapted from "The Clansman," a best-selling novel by Thomas Dixon, the American republic was reborn after Reconstruction, when the native-born whites of the North and South overcame their sectional differences in the name of racial supremacy. Ford's myth of American origins - which involved the subjugation of the frontier and the equivocal replacement of antique honor by modern justice - also typically took place after the Civil War.
In "Gangs," which opens nationwide today, the pivotal event in our history is the riot that convulsed New York in July of 1863. While this emphasis places the immigrant urban working class at the center of the American story - a fairly radical notion in itself - the film hardly sentimentalizes the insurrection, which was both a revolt against local and federal authority and a vicious massacre of the black citizens of New York.
The rioters are seen as exploited, oppressed and destined to be cannon fodder in a war they barely understand, but they are far from heroic, and the violence of the riots makes the film's opening gang battle seem quaint and decorous. What we are witnessing is the eclipse of warlordism and the catastrophic birth of a modern society. Like the old order, the new one is riven by class resentment, racism and political hypocrisy, attributes that change their form at every stage of history but that seem to be as embedded in human nature as the capacity for decency, solidarity and courage.
This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Mr. Scorsese's bravery and integrity in advancing this vision can hardly be underestimated.
full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/movies/20GANG.html?8iwem
What's on the screen after the long struggle to complete the project certainly isn't boring - some of the movie is very imposing -but it's grisly and heavy-spirited. Somewhere along the way, Scorsese's conception turned vague and then got pickled in excessive production values.
For the first time, Scorsese has theatricalized and formalized violence, and some of us may resist being drawn into his fetishistic obsessions. The endless gang war is presented as a love of fighting for its own sake, acted out strictly along ethnic lines. I'm no Marxist, but I can't believe that such a war would be fought without a material cause. Was it a battle for control of the East Side docks? The whiskey trade? Gambling? Distribution of matchsticks and dustpans? Grounded in nothing but blood, the gang war seems a mere projection of an audience-pleasing device onto the past. Scorsese and his writers drop Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) and Tammany Hall corruption into the action, but historical allusiveness is not the same thing as historical accuracy. In all, "Gangs" is an example of the fallacy of research: they got the hats and knives right, but the main lines of the story don't make much sense. If lower-class white groups were fighting each other, wasn't it likely that they wanted to avoid the bottom rung of the social ladder, where blacks, with no other choice, had to live? Blacks are the repressed presence in this movie fantasy, and the omission makes nonsense of the sequences devoted to the horrific Draft Riots of 1863. There were populist elements in that rebellion (for three hundred dollars, a young man could buy his way out of conscription), and the filmmakers harp on them. Fair enough. But they also present the riot as an outgrowth of the Irish fight against the nativists. The tone of what we see is, at first, celebratory; it's a virtuous revolt, the Bolsheviks coming down the streetand then, as Union soldiers fire on the rioters, tragic. The actual rioters, however, burned down a Negro orphanage and strung up black men on lampposts and set them on fire (the orphanage doesn't show up in the movie, the lynchings only in passing). It was blacks who suffered most in this tragedy. The filmmakers, hoping to memorialize the immigrant Irish as the soul of a new nation, went down the wrong path, then pulled back, only to end in confusion, halfway excusing an awful event.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/?021223crci_cinema
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
