Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is an ambitious drama about the gang wars between rival ethnic groups in New York in the 19th century.

In the notorious Manhattan district of the Five Points, the master butcher and gang leader Bill the Butcher holds power. As he sees it, he is defending the rights of native-born Americans against the Irish immigrants pouring into the city in droves. The new Americans find that they were outcasts in their own country and are now outcasts in their new one too. One of those fighting for their cause is the Catholic priest Vallon, but Bill kills him in a showdown.

Several years later, Vallon's son Amsterdam returns to the Five Points to take revenge. Nobody knows his true identity; least of all Bill, who takes Amsterdam under his wing and treats him like the son he never had.

The decisive battle between oppressors and oppressed is actually a somewhat anticlimactic affair. The whole film builds up to this showdown, and then it is actually swallowed up by an even bigger historical event, namely the poor New Yorkers' revolt against conscription into the Union army.

Gangs of New York is handsome, violent and for the most part entertaining, but it is not a coherent whole. One senses that Martin Scorsese intended to tell a much bigger story about the birth of New York, and this epic format can be glimpsed in fragments. The problematic relationship between Amsterdam and the charismatic Bill the Butcher is at the centre and is treated satisfactorily, but the love story between Amsterdam and the con artist Jenny rings hollow.

The director has wanted to tell the small story within the big one and the big story within the small one. Neither really succeeds, but one senses the sweep of the epic in the great panoramas at the beginning and not least in the film's very last scene.