"GANGS OF NEW YORK," Martin Scorsese's brutal, flawed and indelible
epic of 19th-century urban criminality, begins in a mud-walled, torchlighted
cavern, where a group of warriors prepare for battle, arming themselves
with clubs and blades and armoring themselves in motley leather and
cloth. Though this is Lower Manhattan in 1846, it might as well be the
Middle Ages or the time of Gilgamesh: these warlike rituals have an
archaic, archetypal feeling.

And the participants are aware of this. As the members of various
colorfully named Irish gangs emerge into the winter daylight of Paradise
Square (a place long since given over to high-rises and resurrected here
on the grounds of the vast Cinecittà studio complex in Rome), their
native-born Protestant enemies greet them with an invocation of "the
ancient laws of combat." The ensuing melee turns the new-fallen snow
pink with blood and claims the life of Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), an
Irish gang chieftain whose young son witnesses the carnage.

Sixteen years later, the boy, whose name is Amsterdam, has grown into
Leonardo DiCaprio, his wide, implacable face framed by lank hair and a
wispy Van Dyke. He returns from a long stint in the Hell Gate
Reformatory to his old neighborhood, the Five Points, and finds it
ruled by his father's killer, Bill Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), known as the
Butcher, a swaggering monster who has turned the anniversary of Priest's
death into a local holiday.

Like a figure out of Jacobean theater or a Dumas novel, Amsterdam is
consumed by the need for revenge. With the help of a boyhood friend
(Henry Thomas), he infiltrates the Butcher's inner circle, becoming a
surrogate son to the man who assassinated his father and who now, in
accordance with those ancient laws, venerates Priest's memory.

The New York evoked in Amsterdam's voice-over is "a city full of tribes
and war chiefs," whose streets are far meaner than any Mr. Scorsese has
contemplated before. The Butcher has formed an alliance of convenience
with Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent), the kingpin of Tammany Hall, and
together they administer an empire of graft, extortion and larceny that
would put any 20th-century movie gangster or political boss to shame.
Rival fire companies turn burning buildings into sites of rioting and
plunder; crowds gather to witness hangings, bare-knuckled boxing
contests and displays of knife throwing.

As new immigrants, from Ireland and elsewhere, pour off the ships in
New York harbor, they are mustered into Tweed's Democratic Party and then,
since they lack the $300 necessary to buy their way out, into the
Union Army. Occasionally a detachment of reform-minded swells will tour the
Points, availing themselves of the perennial privileges of squeamish
titillation and easy moral superiority. This anarchic inferno is, in
Amsterdam's words, not so much a city as "a cauldron in which a great
city might be forged."

And in recreating it, Mr. Scorsese has made a near-great movie. His
interest in violence, both random and organized, is matched by hislove of 
street-level spectacle. His Old New York is a gaudy multiethnic
carnival of misrule, music and impromptu theater, a Breughel painting
come to life. Though the details of this lawless, teeming, vibrant
milieu may be unfamiliar, we nonetheless instinctively recognize it,
from the 19th-century novels of Dickens and Zola, from samurai movies
and American westerns and from some of this director's previous films.

Most notably in "Mean Streets, "Goodfellas," "The Age of Innocence" and
"Casino," Mr. Scorsese has functioned as a kind of romantic visual
anthropologist, fascinated by tribal lore and language, by half-acknowledged 
codes of honor and retribution and by the boundaries between loyalty and 
vengeance, between courtesy and violence, that underlie a given social order.

As in "Casino" and "The Age of Innocence," the setting of "Gangs" is
sometimes more interesting than the story. At 2 hours 45 minutes, the
film, deftly edited by Mr. Scorsese's frequent collaborator Thelma
Schoonmaker, moves swiftly and elegantly. It is never dull, but I must
confess that I wish it were longer, so that the lives of the
protagonists, rather than standing out in relief against a historical
background, were more fully embedded within it. The quasi-Oedipal
struggle between Amsterdam and Bill is meant to have a mythic
resonance, but that makes it the most conventional element in the picture.

The relationship between the two men is triangulated by Jenny Everdeane
(Cameron Diaz), a flame-haired thief (and a protégée of Bill's) who
catches Amsterdam's eye and steals his lucky religious medallion. But
like Sharon Stone in "Casino," Ms. Diaz ends up with no outlet for her
spitfire energies, since her character is more a structural necessity -
the linchpin of male jealousy - than a fully imagined person....

Like Tony Soprano's crew in the V.I.P. room at the Bada Bing, Bill and
his minions spend a lot of time cavorting with half-naked prostitutes,
which is fair (and for all I know accurate) enough. But all the glum
evocation of lost fathers makes you wonder if any of these guys had
mothers, and you wonder what a typical household in the Five Points
might have looked like. (Though I, like just about everyone else, had
been waiting impatiently for "Gangs," I almost wish Mr. Scorsese and
his screenwriters had been delayed long enough to take account of "Paradise
Alley," Kevin Baker's new novel about the draft riots of 1863...)

These objections should not detract from an appreciation of what Mr.
Scorsese and his cast have done. Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Diaz may be too
pretty for the neighborhood, but one should hardly hold their being
movie stars against them; they are smart, eager and intrepid actors as
well. For his part Mr. Day-Lewis positively luxuriates in his character's villainy 
and turns Bill's flavorsome dialogue into vernacular poetry.

He understands the Shakespearean dimensions of the character and has
enough art to fill them out. Surrounded by Irish brogues and
deracinated British accents, Mr. Day-Lewis has the wit to speak an early 
version of Noo Yawkese, making the Butcher the butt of a marvelous historical
joke: this bigoted, all-but-forgotten nativist, it turns out, bequeathed his speech patterns to the children of the immigrants he despised.

"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 documentary 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 "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.

This movie was a long time in the making, but its life has barely begun.

Now that the industry gossip about it has subsided, let us hope that a
more substantial discussion can start. People who care about American
history, professionally and otherwise, will no doubt weigh in on the
accuracy of its particulars and the validity of its interpretation; they
will also, I hope, revisit some of their own suppositions in light of
its unsparing and uncompromised imagining of the past. I said earlier
that "Gangs of New York" is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over
time, it will make up the distance.

"Gangs of New York" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent
or adult guardian). The pervasiveness of its violence makes you realize
how much New York has changed in a century and a half. On the other hand,
the nudity, profanity and sexual references may lead you to think that
it has barely changed at all.

GANGS OF NEW YORK

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian and
Kenneth Lonergan, based on a story by Mr. Cocks; director of
photography, Michael Ballhaus; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by
Howard Shore; production designer, Dante Ferretti; produced by Alberto
Grimaldi and Harvey Weinstein; released by Miramax Films. Running
time: 165 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon), Daniel Day-Lewis (Bill the
Butcher), Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane), Liam Neeson (Priest Vallon),
Jim Broadbent (Boss Tweed), John C. Reilly (Happy Jack), Henry Thomas
(Johnny) and Brendan Gleeson (Monk McGinn).

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