The filmmaker’s 2002 epic is the cinematic equivalent of a tabloid paper.
, his satire on boho customs and conventions in New York’s SoHo that finally did it for me. I have no idea if I would still find it funny. I suspect not, judging from the video clip I watched on YouTube the other day – but at that stage, it was enough., with its gallows humour, its galloping pace and Scorsese’s mastery of the long take, I had become a true believer.
For me, he was shaping up as a brilliant chronicler of America’s many tribes. He had started with the country’s Gangsterland, steeping himself in the politics of the Mafia. Now, he was moving on.– a book I loved – he showed that he could immerse himself in a much more rarefied atmosphere, one conditioned by the distinctions between new and old money in the rapidly changing New York society of the 1870s., and my disillusionment set in.
Scorsese had been wanting to make it for two decades before he finally got the chance. It all started when he came across journalist Herbert Asbury’s florid tales of the New York underworld in the lead-up to the Civil War.Asbury’s book conjured up a weird, primeval world centring on lower Manhattan’s Five Points district with its two warring gangs, the immigrant Irish and the Nativists, whose juicy vernacular spoke of “crushers”, “sluggers” and “plug uglies”.
There are actors who can handle exaggeration on this scale, and Scorsese was fortunate enough to enlist one of the best. As the film’s villain, Bill the Butcher, Daniel Day-Lewis embraces the melodrama to the point of burlesque. His Bill is a moustache-twirler out of Victorian melodrama made fresh again by Day-Lewis’ gift for self-parody.
His co-stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, aren’t nearly as adaptable. Both struggle to inflate their performances to the point where they can stay afloat in the wake of Day-Lewis’ overwhelming theatricality.. There’s conviction in his role as the gormless Ernest, who’s so deep into self-denial that he can’t face the fact that he’s slowly killing the wife he tells himself he loves.
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