ALL ABOUT BILL
Gangs of New York
IMDB | Official Site
dir. Martin Scorsese starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz
For a film that opens with such a ferocious beginning, Gangs of New York builds up a terrific expectation for a showdown ending. It's a film that brushes with greatness, showcasing the enduring talent of the leonine Daniel Day-Lewis and the ambitious grasp of Martin Scorsese. What Gangs of New York doesn't do so well is sustain its intensity to the end, drawing the curtain with an unsatisfying conclusion.

Ambitious scope, tangled plot

Gangs of New York opens in a magnificent tribal atmosphere. Irish immigrants gather in tunnels, sharpening axes, maces and knives, looking every bit as though they were going to war in the 13th century rather than the 19th. Led by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), the immigrant army assembles in a squalid crossroads, a nasty bunch dotting the stark white snow on the ground. Arrayed against them is a horde of native-born Americans lead by Bill the Butcher, a resounding villain played by Daniel Day-Lewis.

What ensues from that meeting is one of the most brutally violent street fights put on celluloid. Forget The Two Towers, the opening gang war has more carnage than twenty minutes of Helm's Deep. To detail the depth of ritualistic savagery portrayed in this battle scene would be a bit much. These gangs play for keeps and take no prisoners. Of the many casualties littering the snowy field after the battle is the young son of Priest Vallon, who is allowed to live but vows vengeance on Bill the Butcher.

It's difficult to say this but Gangs of New York could have used more formula than the ambitious scope that director Martin Scorsese has been allowed. With that kind of set up any lesser director would have fashioned a linear (but hopefully driving) narrative leading to the expected resolution. Scorsese has tried to create something more, a wider social history of New York at the time of the Civil War. While he has succeeded in weaving this world before our eyes, along the way he loses the threads necessary for engaging the audience with motivation, with emotion and conclusion.

The sides in Gangs of New York are neither all good nor all bad. This is what Scorsese lays out for us by the end of the movie. Although Bill the Butcher has destroyed his enemy, Priest Vallon, he honours his dead opponent's memory every year, calling him the only man he's killed worth remembering. By comparison, DiCaprio's Amsterdam character - the young boy grown up to exact his vengeance - is flat, with less dimension that Ray Liotta's ganster ingenue in Scorsese's classic Goodfellas.

An Oscar for that mustache

The comparison is worth exploring. Both Liotta and DiCaprio's young characters serve as tourists into the underbellies of society. Both characters become more or less willing servitors in criminal families, learning for us the rules of conduct, what could get you stabbed in the back, what could get you the riches of the kingdom. Liotta's Henry Hill leaps into his world with self-serving intentions, DiCaprio's Amsterdam has the motivation of the Count of Monte Cristo.

Where Henry Hill becomes a more interesting character is when his path diverges from his crime family. Hill is ensconced in his goombah regime and becomes introspective when he is given the opportunity to turn his back on it. Scorsese and Gangs writer Jay Cocks never seem to give Amsterdam the internal dialogue necessary to either make DiCaprio's character as grey as he should be, or strengthen his motivation to gain vengeance on Bill the Butcher.

Less attention still is spent on Cameron Diaz' pretty thief Jennie, a woman caught between her loyalty to the brutal Bill and new lover Amsterdam. Diaz is game and can turn in a believable character (see her in Being John Malkovich for instance) but is stretched when her character has to show more emotion than a saucy look. Her character is no different than many other women characters in manly films, left to pick up the pieces after the final battle.

The field then, is left all to Daniel Day-Lewis' monster of a character, Bill the Butcher, a role he seizes with great gusto. In Bill, Lewis injects the entire furious and macabre character of Gangs of New York. Full of physical menace, growling snarled but poetic dialogue, Bill, in both his opening appearance as the medieval warrior and later as the wainscotted, top hat-wearing William Cutting, challenges everyone in the scenes shared to stand up to him. No one does. This is just one of those films so thoroughly dominated by one delicious performance that makes all other performances transparent in comparison. Like Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, Day-Lewis will gain a lot of attention come awards time.

Unlike Bill, the rest of the film doesn't have as much energy. Once the setting and characters of New York in the 1860s is laid out, the film begins to meander. Scorsese ambitiously tries to draw together every quarter of social and political conflict, bit of cultural past that seems to have entranced him, as if desperate to portray that slice of history for the screen knowing that it won't be attempted again. While admirable, it results in considerable bloat. How much the resulting tangle is a result of the much publicized feud between Scorsese and his Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein is unknown, but the product is a tangle.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film's conclusion where Scorsese tries to sum up the Draft Riots, racial and class divisions, and also the inevitable clash between Bill and Amsterdam at the same time, jumping between each event. Over this all, the cliched use of a newspaper montage and an annoying telegraph operator's commentary seems a half-hearted way to make it all coherent. This would have been less of a challenge if Scorsese had allowed the audience to use more of their imagination in absorbing the elements of social history while concentrating on the central story.

In theatres now.

Merry Christmas

EPIC ONSLAUGHT
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
IMDB | Official Site
dir. Peter Jackson starring: Viggo Mortensen, Miranda Otto, Elijah Wood
It's hard to judge a film that is essentially a middle chapter in the center of one monumental film. Peter Jackson's spectacular "Two Towers" doesn't stand on its own and doesn't pretend to be structured in any way that allows it to be judged as a singular narrative. It would be like judging a marriage by its honeymoon.

A fantasy on a massive scale. Overpowering, really.

This is what The Two Towers is. It's three hours of awesome epic fantasy. An onslaught of vistas, clashing armies, bellowing heroes, giant animated creatures, and soaring architecture. You have wizards fighting demons, trees that come alive, snarling dark warriors, frenzied sword fights and flashing arrows. No one in this film speaks like anyone you know; they are characters from literature. They pronounce and declare. Their words can be described as ominous, sneering, heartfelt but not ironic or cynical. This film is the living, moving demonstration of what fantasy is.

What can I say? If you don't get it, you don't get it. The Two Towers can be both a fabulous journey encompassing an adventure of epic scale and a bewildering story that jumps between three, sometimes four subplots. It can be a thrilling romp dashing from fight to fight and it can also be an overwhelming attack on the senses. What everyone should agree upon is that The Two Towers is grand.

For the moment setting aside The Fellowship of the Rings, has there ever been a film this big? In all the history of epic films, not Spartacus, not The Robe, not Lawrence of Arabia really can be said to approach the sheer scale of an adventure film that follows journeys of seemingly hundreds of miles, opening with a descent down the center of a mountain and ends with the crashing thunder of a broken dam. You might ask what the great David Lean or Akira Kurosawa might have accomplished with the same technology, resources and time as Peter Jackson. In their day, both masters did marshal massive productions. Without the aid of digital choreography and post-production, is Kurosawa's battle of Nagashino in Kagemusha any less grand than the rows upon rows of modelled orcs marching on Helm's Deep in The Two Towers?

It is not just the question of scale. For all his obvious love of the material, Peter Jackson is an entertainer. He can't resist the jokes, the cliffhangers and campy stunts. Jackson can match the scope of a David Lean horizon but, at least in the Two Towers, he isn't able to sustain the confident blush of a subject matter that places itself above entertainment. The Two Towers is part adventure serial and part biblical epic.

An excess of armour

Even if not art, there are many crowd-pleasing moments in the Two Towers that make it a banquet of entertainment. An early skirmish between mounted human warriors against goblins riding giant hyena-like creatures is exciting hack and slash. For those who remember the books, the chance to at last see a towering Oliphant (a four tusked elephant on the same scale as a brontosaurus) matches the expectation and satisfaction as when the first dinosaur makes its appearance in Jurassic Park.

Such moments pale in comparison to the achievement of the digital character Gollum, as originally performed by Shakespearan actor Andrew Serkis. The pathetic and crazy creature is probably the first fully realized digital character in a live action film that can be said to be really acting. Whereas previous 3D inserts like Jar Jar in the Star Wars prequels never escaped their cartoony heritage or were not as well rendered, The Two Towers' Gollum is nearly seamless, neither a puppet, not quite real. To discern its qualities is to be fascinated whenever he is on screen. Without Gollum, you might be dwelling too much on the boyscout relationship between hobbits.

In theatres now.