Month: August 2018

Goodfellas

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Goodfellas (1990)

Dir. Martin Scorsese

Written by: Martin Scorsese & Nicholas Pileggi (from Pileggi’s book)

Starring: Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco

 

I have been procrastinating and struggling with the idea of writing about Goodfellas for several weeks now. I’ve written before that I’m not much of a fan of writing about movies that I don’t like, but, sometimes, it’s just as difficult to write about a movie that you really love, one that’s universally accepted as a masterpiece, and that has been lauded to death already. I don’t know what more I could add to the conversation surrounding Goodfellas, a movie that is often brought up as a contender in the debate over the best films of its ilk, if not the best films of all time. There’s really no debating for me; Goodfellas is quite near the top of my personal favorites, and I think that it’s almost a perfect movie. It’s a combination of cinema as high art and as mainstream entertainment, an accessible masterpiece that absolutely builds consensus among almost any movie fans. When I was watching Goodfellas for something like the hundredth time to prepare for this post, I sent a friend of mine a message that simply said, “I could watch Goodfellas every day and be happy,” and that sentiment is absolutely true. It provides everything that I need in a movie, and though it probably isn’t my absolute favorite movie of all time, it would likely be my desert island movie pick.

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Based on the true story of his involvement with the mafia, Goodfellas follows Henry Hill (Liotta) from his first forays into organized crime as a boy growing up in New York City, to his rise to the pinnacle of the criminal underworld. Along the way, Scorsese introduces a memorable cast of characters and details the inner workings of a well-oiled criminal empire. More than any other movie, including the most classic and lauded of all gangster films, Goodfellas acts as a thorough and immersive tutorial in the operations of the mafia. I’m largely dispensing with a plot synopsis for the movie not only because it’s a movie that anyone reading this post should already be familiar with, but also because its narrative has become the ür-text for the gangster film since its release nearly thirty years ago. The story of Goodfellas will be familiar to anyone who is familiar with the archetypal trope of the individual struggling to define and achieve the American dream, but it’s the telling that makes the movie so memorable. So many lesser movies have quoted and lifted from Goodfellas that it almost seems to have birthed the genre anew, and though it obviously owes a debt to the other giants of gangster cinema, it stands out as an original and vital push forward for the genre.

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Clearly, Martin Scorsese was already established as a master by the time that he made Goodfellas, but this is a film that no doubt vaulted him into another stratosphere as a visual and narrative artist. The movie takes its audience on a 140-minute thrill ride, visually and aurally matching the opulence and the chaos that would come to define Hill’s life as he ascended through the ranks of an organized crime family. The film features the familiarly expressive camera work that would come to define Scorsese’s cinema, and the whiplash editing of longtime Scorsese collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, with both the cinematography and the montage combining to underscore the film’s haphazard narrative. Scorsese has also chosen to tell this tale episodically, condensing thirty years of action into a handful of vignettes that chart Hill’s rise and the increasing unraveling of himself and those around him. These directorial choices give the film a sense of urgency and immediacy, while the ever-present voice over narration lends it its credence and position of authority. While The Godfather is told as a grand epic of Shakespearean proportions, Goodfellas feels thoroughly modern, charting a similar story of criminal enterprise and demise, but doing so in a more engaging and more vital way. It’s a movie that eschews rumination in favor of dragging the audience along by the throat, forcing the audience to see and absorb, and, in essence, experience, the things that Hill is experiencing. When the movie does slow down a bit to let the viewer catch her breath, it’s typically in the form of a freeze-frame, highly constructed to hammer home some point or moment of great narrative import. Goodfellas is full of these and other cinematic visual tricks, a tour de force of image paired with narrative meaning, with Scorsese pulling out all the stops and incorporating every bit of cinematic flair he had developed to that point in his career.

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Scorsese also assembles one of the best casts of any of his films, with Goodfellas combining a who’s-who of established actors, many of whom Scorsese had never worked with in the past, and a panacea of up-and-coming actors, who would go on to people the next generation of mafia media. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci both turn in typically electric performances, with De Niro officially beginning a phase in his career where he started to play the elder statesman, and Pesci being rewarded with an Oscar for his unhinged performance as the ruthless gangster Tommy. Relative newcomer Liotta acquits himself well to a meaty and difficult role, aptly charting Hill’s physical and mental degradation throughout the course of the film. He is by turns charming and suave, and then haggard and harried, a life lived on the fringes of society having obviously taken its toll on his character. Hill is the closest thing the movie has to an audience surrogate, because even though he’s on the inside, he acts as a tour guide through this dark world and his engaging performance encourages the kind of identification that leads to the stomach-turning excitement of the film’s final act as everything starts to crumble around him and his family.

Lorraine Bracco deserves special mention for turning in a varied and stellar performance as Hill’s wife, Karen. Karen is an outsider when Hill first meets and approaches her, but Bracco never plays her as helpless or naïve, instead choosing to make her character uneasy, but ultimately tacitly approving of the madness unfolding around her. Karen is obviously taken in by the lavish lifestyle that Henry introduces her to, with the possibilities of life as a mobster’s wife literally unfolding in front of her eyes in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, as the camera charts an unbroken course through the Copacabana, showing Karen and the audience the kinds of pleasures that abound for those willing to bend a rule. Though she’s a wide-eyed observer, Karen is always aware of the work that her husband does to afford them their lifestyle, and soon enough her own character trajectory starts to mirror that of her husband. By film’s end, Karen is just as strung out and paranoid as Henry, and Bracco sinks her teeth into these later scenes, showing the once prim and proper Karen starting to come apart at the seams. Hers is a powerful performance in a film that largely relegates its female characters to the sidelines.

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My own history with Goodfellas probably goes back a little over 20 years. I’m not exactly sure when the first time I saw the movie was, but I can remember borrowing it on VHS from the library, probably sometime shortly after I had borrowed The Godfather for the first time. Because of the close proximity of my first experience to both movies, and I’m sure not unusually, these two classic gangster movies have always been inextricably linked for me. I really liked both movies at the time, and I still do, but when I was a kid, The Godfather reigned supreme in my opinion. That attitude shifted at some point in my teens and early twenties, when I started to recognize the importance and the style of the more modern, and, by that point, more influential Goodfellas. To me, it’s just a more engaging movie. Even though I have its lines of dialogue memorized and I can anticipate every great and memorable set piece, Goodfellas never fails to grab my attention and keep me locked in for the entirety of its runtime. Though I go to see every new Scorsese release in the theaters, Goodfellas is the only one of his classics that I ever go back to rewatch with any regularity. I need to be in a particular mood to want to sit through Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, but Goodfellas is always a welcome escape for me. There are better movies, though not many, in my opinion, but this is one that earns its place as my desert island movie because it so perfectly triggers every pleasure center that a movie can activate in my brain. Its narrative structure and pacing, the stellar performances of its cast, the attitude that the film has, its great soundtrack, all add up to one of the most satisfying movie experiences that I can treat myself to.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

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Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000)

Dir. Jim Jarmusch

Written by: Jim Jarmusch

Starring: Forrest Whitaker, John Tormey, Isaach de Bankolé, Henry Silva

 

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai was my introduction to Jim Jarmusch, a filmmaker who I’d go on to really get into in my early twenties. When I first watched the movie, probably around 16 years old, I picked it up because I knew that all the music had been composed by the RZA and I knew that it combined two of my favorite things: kung fu/Eastern martial arts culture and old school New York City hip hop culture. While I expected to like the movie, simply based on its premise of a modern assassin who lives by the ancient code of the samurai, I didn’t expect it to strike me in such a way. Quentin Tarantino aside, I hadn’t found a filmmaker who seemed this interested in projecting a specific idea of “cool” through his cinema, by way of inscrutable references, impressionistic sequences that seem to exist outside the realm of the narrative, and an insistence on creating mood over narrative clarity. I enjoyed Ghost Dog a great deal, but it was never a movie that I watched very often. It isn’t terribly complex, but I did find it to be challenging when I was a teen, maybe because I wasn’t as steeped in the practices of a post-modern filmmaker like Jarmusch. Going back and watching it today, with a decade and a half of viewership under my belt, and a more than passing familiarity with Jarmusch’s brand of “cool” cinema, I think that I enjoy Ghost Dog even more.

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The film’s protagonist, the titular Ghost Dog (Whitaker), is a contract killer sworn to live his life by the strict code of the samurai. Shortly after the film opens, Ghost Dog is fulfilling a contract for Louie (Tormey), a low-level gangster who employs Ghost Dog, and to whom Ghost Dog has sworn fealty due to Louie’s saving his life when he was a teen. While Ghost Dog carries out the hit on Handsome Frank (Richard Portnow), he doesn’t realize that there is a woman in the room with Frank, whom he leaves alive and who gives him a copy of the book Rashomon. It turns out that the young woman is the daughter of Louie’s mob boss, Vargo (Henry Silva), and Vargo puts out the word to his crew to find and kill Ghost Dog in order to distance the mob from the murder. This proves to be more difficult than expected, however, as Ghost Dog only contacts Louie by carrier pigeon and is notoriously secretive about his personal life. While the mobsters have difficulty tracking down a ghost, Ghost Dog begins turning the tables on them and hunting them down to save his own life.

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The first time I saw Ghost Dog, I was taken in by it almost immediately. Its overwhelming sense of cool was enveloping, and its style was unlike any gangster movie I had ever seen before. The movie is a pastiche of so many disparate influences that it seemed specifically engineered to my own personal taste preferences at the time. It blends classic gangster movies, Eastern philosophy and religion, hip hop culture, and classic American pulp, and the end result is a mélange of signifiers and cultural references that add up to a great action movie, all held together by the glue that is Jarmusch’s impressionistic, post-modern directorial style. Scenes fade in and out at random, intercut by passages from the Hagakure, an ancient Japanese text that defines the life and rituals of the samurai. These spoken passages serve as both counterpoint and context for the film, and help to define the personal philosophy of Ghost Dog, who is never outwardly expressive or outspoken. The movie is often dependent on its cultural references, using them to imbue otherwise mundane conversations or happenings with a greater import. This could potentially be seen as a weak storytelling device, but within the framework of the hazy world that Jarmusch has created, within the framework of the film as a dream, reliance on these signifiers is key. Just as in dreams, these cultural signifiers act as markers that help to orient the characters and the viewer, and there are enough delightfully strange elements at work in Ghost Dog that one could certainly support a reading of the film that paints it as one big dream, but I don’t necessarily agree with that reading. I don’t think that Ghost Dog is a film that can so simply be defined as representing a dream or objective reality, but, rather, I think it is a film that is primarily interested in exploring a dreamlike philosophy of existence.

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From its inception, theorists writing about the cinema seemed likely to compare the experience of watching a movie to that of dreaming. The idea of accepting images, sometimes strange and foreign to our consciousness, broadcast through a stream of light onto a screen in a darkened space brought to mind the somnambulant experience of the dream. Since then, movies have seemed to be a perfect medium to explore otherwise difficult to quantify psychological and dreamlike phenomenon, and Ghost Dog is a perfect example of the film working to codify and represent a dreamlike existence. The film explicitly references the dream in one of the interstitial passages in which Ghost Dog reads from the Hagakure, which says, “It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world that we live in is not a bit different from this.” This passage, along with the presence of Rashomon, a classic tale about the illusory nature of concrete reality, indicate strongly that Ghost Dog is interested in representing not an actual dream, but a state of being in which the subject has some control over a dreamlike existence. Ghost Dog is awake, and I believe that the incidents depicted in the film are meant to be objectively real, but through his adherence to meditation and Eastern philosophy, Ghost Dog has achieved a state of being in which he floats through the corporeal world as if he would a dream world.

The film also supports this reading in more concrete ways, as Ghost Dog is frequently treated by all of the other characters as some sort of Other. He famously cannot understand the language of the man he calls his best friend, Raymond (de Bankole), an ice cream man who only speaks French, but the two have no trouble communicating with one another. The mobsters seem totally vexed by Ghost Dog, unable to track his movements efficiently, and unable to understand his strict adherence to the moral code of the samurai. In the film, Ghost Dog exists separately from other characters, communicating on different wave lengths, and often seeming to pass by strangers unnoticed, as would an apparition. It is also important to note that Ghost Dog is sometimes recognized by strangers who appear to be privy to some knowledge of the lifestyle that Ghost Dog has committed himself to. Perhaps this is because he is truly operating on a different psychological and existential plane. He seems to inhabit the place of the waking dream, existing in the real world and able to have a tangible effect on an earthly plane, but also readily able to slip back into an elevated and obfuscated level of consciousness, submitting to the logic of the dream state.

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Stylistically, Jarmusch insists on maintaining a tenuous grip on narrative reality, allowing the story to unfold out of sync, told from multiple points of view, and featuring several elliptically cryptic inserts. This narrative structure is obviously readily identifiable as a dreamlike structure, as are the aforementioned cultural references that Jarmusch packs in relentlessly. Ghost Dog is clearly an homage to several gangster films that came before it, including most obviously Melville’s Le Samourai and Suzuki’s Branded to Kill. These films, as well as Rashomon, heavily influence the movie in the same way that visual media and pop culture have an insidious way of sneaking into dreams. The cultural appropriations also serve to orient the ways in which the characters see themselves, for example all of Louie’s mob friends are paint-by-number gangsters. They lament their ineffectualness as criminals, and respect Ghost Dog for “taking [them] out the right way,” when he goes on his killing spree, but their entire identity is constructed from the gangster archetype established by classical Hollywood. Through a maze of signifiers, Jarmusch has created not only a framework of relevant texts through which to interpret and understand his post-modern gangster film, he’s also revealed the source material through which he, and by extension, his characters have come to understand the world. It’s a very meta- tactic, and the sort of filmic exercise that could certainly turn some viewers off, but it’s one of the things that I love Ghost Dog for the most.

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Of course, all of Jarmusch’s high-minded philosophical import would be largely irrelevant if he weren’t able to craft a film that was equally engaging as a crime thriller, and, luckily, Ghost Dog is certainly that. The movie is a satisfyingly grimy low-stakes crime caper. It reminds me of classic crime films like Cassevettes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Like in that film, the characters in Ghost Dog are down on their luck losers, for the most part, and though the stakes are high, individually, none of the action would resonate in the way that it does in epic crime films like The Godfather. It’s a hard-scrabble vision of the criminal underworld, and it’s peopled by memorable characters played by familiar character actors who all turn in impressive, understated performances. Forest Whitaker is the perfect Ghost Dog, relying largely on gesture and his expressive face to convey meaning in a role with very few lines of dialogue. Though he’s had at least a half dozen higher profile roles, I still always picture him as the stoic assassin Ghost Dog. I’m sure that most people would be content to simply enjoy Ghost Dog for its merits as a great, low budget crime thriller, and would totally eschew the sort of philosophical exploration that the film invites me towards, but, to me, Ghost Dog is the rare movie that is as cinematically satisfying as it is intellectually satisfying, and the ending of the movie begs for a sequel, although I doubt one will ever come. Still, the movie exists wonderfully as it is as an homage to supposed “low culture” art forms, such as kung fu, hip hop, and the gangster film, that combines all of these elements to transcend them in creating a movie that asks questions about the very nature of the human experience.

Ghostbusters

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Ghostbusters (1984)

Dir. Ivan Reitman

Written by: Dan Aykroyd & Harold Ramis

Starring: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson

 

This is a big one for me. Ghostbusters has been a strong cinematic constant in my life. It’s definitely in my top ten favorite movies of all time, and, depending on the day, it vies for a spot as my personal favorite movie ever. Born in 1985, I emerged into a world in which Ghostbusters was already a phenomenon, with the movie becoming a big box office success, inspiring a cartoon spinoff, a line of toys and action figures, and a fervent fandom among young children and adults alike. I was all-in on Ghostbusters from the moment I first saw the cartoon, and soon after, the movie. I collected the toys, I had Ghostbusters clothing, and I obsessively quoted the movie to my family. Some of my earliest memories are Ghostbusters related, such as a Halloween when I was only three and I went trick-or-treating as Ray Stantz, complete with a homemade jumpsuit and a borrowed proton pack. It’s really the first, and probably only, piece of nostalgic fandom that I engage in, and I still can’t get enough of it, watching the movie at least a couple of times a year. For me, Ghostbusters represents a perfect intersection of actual cinematic quality and nostalgia. I can’t pretend that the way that I love Ghostbusters and its resultant media properties isn’t painted heavily in coats of nostalgia, but there’s also no denying that it represents a high-water mark for its brand of studio comedy in the mid-1980s. It’s a classic of American cinema and a cult of fandom wouldn’t have sprung up around it so readily were it not, simply put, an all-time great comedy.

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I’ll provide a brief plot synopsis for anyone who might, for some unknown reason, be unfamiliar with Ghostbusters, but if you fall into the category I’d urge you to just go watch the movie and then come back to reading this. The titular Ghostbusters are Peter Venkman (Murray), Ray Stantz (Aykroyd), and Egon Spengler (Ramis), three out of work college professors with a special interest in paranormal phenomena. After they’ve lost their university jobs, the scientists decide to enter into the private sector, opening up an agency that specializes in the removal of supernatural and paranormal pests. Though business is initially slow, once the Ghostbusters break their first cases, they become a phenomenon themselves, and they’re joined by Winston Zeddmore (Hudson) to help them take on more cases. One of their notable early cases is for Dana Barrett (Weaver), who returns to her apartment one day to find a portal to another dimension opening up in her refrigerator, and whom Dr. Venkman falls head over heels for. As they pursue Dana’s case, the Ghostbusters discover that the portal is intended to welcome Gozer the Gozerian, an ancient God who travels through space and time destroying worlds, onto Earth. The Ghostbusters prepare to face off against Gozer and a host of otherworldly entities to save their city and the world.

There’s not a lot that I will write here that would do anything to affirm or deny the greatness of Ghostbusters. It’s an iconic movie, one that has earned its spot in the pantheon of great movies that will likely never be awarded by an Academy or earn a spot in the curriculum at a film school, but a movie that is widely acknowledged, nonetheless, as one of the best examples of brilliant, consumable, pop-culture entertainment. To me it’s every bit as important or meaningful as Citizen Kane or The Godfather. Though it doesn’t exist in a prestige genre, Ghostbusters stood for many as a gold standard for quality comedy in an era when competition was unbelievably stiff in that particular genre. I’m sure this is a biased opinion because of my age and having grown up watching all of these movies on cable television constantly, but the 1980s were the golden era for studio comedies as so many great and iconic film comedians started to emerge and find their voices, as well as finding writing and directing partners who understood how to harness their comedic energy. While Murray and Aykroyd were emerging as leading men, along with Eddie Murphy and Martin Short, as well as the prolonged great run of genius Steve Martin into the 1980s, directors such as Ivan Reitman and screenwriters such as Ramis were pushing the boundaries of the studio comedy in broad, unexplored directions. There’s a buzz surrounding classic comedies of this era that I just don’t feel in modern comedies. I think that it’s the slapdash feeling that comedies like Ghostbusters give me that I don’t feel in modern comedies, the knowledge that at least 50% of what made the final cut was improvised on the spot by gifted comedians so comfortable with riffing off of one another. There are plenty of comedies that have great chemistry, great scripted lines, and great adlibs, but Ghostbusters will always take the cake for me for the best and strongest comedic ensemble ever assembled.

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The focus of that ensemble, of course, is Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman. Though the film features a balanced ensemble of co-leads, and a supporting cast that receives nearly equal billing and several memorable moments, it’s always Murray who stands out to me in Ghostbusters. Venkman was never my favorite Ghostbuster when I was a child, but even though I related more to Ray Stantz, I could easily recognize that Murray was the movie’s star. He displays the timing, wit, and charm that turned him into a bona fide superstar in the 1980s and a comedy legend ever since. Venkman’s character is equal parts sleaze, cynicism, and off-the-cuff observational wit, and that characterization has largely followed Murray around ever since. Of course Murray has expanded his range and his choice of roles throughout his career, and there are no shortage of wonderful roles and performances for any fan to latch onto, but when I think of Bill Murray it’s Peter Venkman who I picture. His performance in Ghostbusters encapsulates everything that Murray has come to represent in his career and in the public imagination. I’m not particularly a Murray fanboy, but there’s no denying that he deserves a place on the film comedy Mt. Rushmore and that his likeness should include a proton pack.

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Of course, a single performance doesn’t an all-time comedy make, and Murray is backed up by a supporting cast that knocks it out of the park at every turn. Ramis is suitably understated as Egon, the straight man of the team, while Aykroyd brings a hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed character to Ray, the most put-upon Ghostbuster. He’s a great foil for Murray’s outsize confidence, and the dynamic between the two actors feels real, with Venkman taking every opportunity to belittle Stantz. Sigourney Weaver more than holds her own in her scenes with Murray, engaging in quick verbal sparring worthy of the best screwball comedies. She also does a great job creating two different characters when Dana is possessed late in the film and her entire demeanor changes. By far, though, my favorite supporting performance in Ghostbusters is Rick Moranis’s nerdy neighbor, Louis. Moranis is perfectly cast as the nebbish, love-struck Louis, whose only desire is to get his neighbor, Dana, to notice him and come to his party. Like Murray, Moranis proves himself to be a master improviser, and he’s adept at both verbal and physical comedy. After probably 100 viewings, Ghostbusters doesn’t always get as many belly laughs out of me as it used to, but Moranis’s party scene in which he rattles off the market prices of the food that he purchased and introduces his guests based on their jobs, salaries, and the remaining balance of their mortgages, never fails to leave me in stitches.

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That’s the thing about Ghostbusters, for me. Sure I have an obviously strong nostalgic attachment to the movie and its related ephemera, but watching it today it still elicits genuine laughs from me every time. I know the movie inside and out, and I’ve been able to quote it, chapter and verse, basically since I learned to talk, but it never loses its humor for me. The simple brilliance of many of its punchlines, and the joy of watching master comedians riffing off of one another, never ceases to leave me in stitches. The day that I watched Ghostbusters to prepare to write this post, I was having a supremely bad start to the day, with my work encroaching onto the one day a week that I am supposed to get to myself, but as soon as I popped in the DVD and the film’s iconic opening shot of the lion statues in front of the New York Public Library filled my television screen, my concerns were all forgotten. Every time I watch Ghostbusters, I am able to fully submit myself to 105 minutes of pure, unadulterated comedy pleasure, and that’s why I still watch it two to three times a year. It’s a movie that can instantly change my mood, taking me back to a place in my life before jobs and social responsibilities and constant stress. Even though I know every punchline, I find myself laughing at a different joke every time. Ghostbusters provides me with a guaranteed respite and a trip down memory lane like no other movie I’ve ever encountered. I’ve had lots of favorite movies over the course of my life, but few, if any, have had the persistence of Ghostbusters. It’s always exactly what I need when I pull it off the shelf.

Ghostbusters is a perfect movie for this project, and it’s one that I’ve been eagerly anticipating getting to write about since I started doing this work in late 2016. I’ve written about tons of movies that I have various nostalgic attachments to for one reason or another so far, but I don’t think any encapsulate the idea of going back and digging through physical media that I’ve collected so perfectly as Ghostbusters. Last year, writing about Apocalypse Now, I briefly touched on the fact that Ghostbusters was the first movie I ever saw on DVD, and I think that’s interesting because my relationship with the movie has always been related to physical artifacts as much as the film itself. In the 1980s and early 1990s, I was an avid collector of the action figures associated with the animated series The Real Ghostbusters, and my early fandom of the movie was strongly associated with those toys. At that point, for me, Ghostbusters was as much about its ancillary properties as it was the original movie, and I think that the nostalgic bond that I have to the entire franchise extends as much from the toys that I played with, and the good memories that I associated with engaging in the fan discourse of the movie through play and dress up at Halloween, as it does to my early experience of watching the movie itself. I guess it’s fitting that a movie about ghosts would be so associated to me with memory and repetition, now for thirty years playing the movie over and over, engaging with it in so many different contexts and through so many different lenses at various points in my life. It’s a pleasant sort of haunting that I’ll probably never really grow out of.

Gangs of New York

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Gangs of New York (2002)

Dir. Martin Scorsese

Written by: Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, Kenneth Lonergan

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz

 

Gangs of New York was released at a time when I was probably watching Martin Scorsese movies more regularly than at any other time in my life, but for some reason I didn’t see it in the theaters. In fact, I didn’t see Gangs of New York until it was already a couple of years old and I purchased a used copy of it on DVD at the Exchange in Pittsburgh, in 2005. In high school, I gained a strong affinity for Scorsese’s cinema, but I largely only skimmed the surface. I watched Taxi Driver and Goodfellas obsessively, and Raging Bull, Mean Streets, and Casino were on a list of movies that I professed to admire but hadn’t watched closely yet, but the rest of Scorsese’s deep filmography remained an unknown to me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t go to see Gangs of New York in the theater when it was released, since it didn’t share obvious affinities with Scorsese’s crime and mafia related output, or maybe I was just scared off by the film’s daunting run time, or maybe I just didn’t have any friends who were interested in seeing it. Whatever the reason, I never saw Gangs of New York on a big screen, and though it’s become a movie that I like quite a bit, I’m disappointed that I robbed myself of the opportunity to experience its larger-than-life sets and set pieces in a theater environment. Gangs of New York is often thought of as a lesser entry into Scorsese’s filmography, despite it receiving a slew of award nominations and decent critical acclaim upon its release, and I can’t really argue that as a movie it doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of Scorsese’s best work. In spite of its flaws, however, Gangs of New York is still a big, engaging, and entertaining movie, and one that seems to have gained in importance and relevance in light of current societal realities in America.

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Based on a historical recounting of the history of New York City and the gangs, both street gangs and political gangs, that ran it in the mid-19th century, Gangs of New York is a tale of the savage and brutal mechanics behind the development of one of the greatest cities in the world. The film explores New York’s Five Points neighborhood through the eyes of Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio), a young Irish immigrant who witnessed his father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), die at the hands of Bill “The Butcher” Cutting (Day-Lewis) in a brutal gang fight when he was just a boy. Amsterdam spent his adolescence in a reform home, but when he is a young man he returns to the Five Points, sworn to avenge his father’s death. In order to do so, Amsterdam gains Bill’s trust and becomes his close ally, all the while planning to one day turn on Bill. Through his relationship with Bill, Amsterdam is introduced to the power structures and the powerful men that run New York City, and he learns that Bill may be the most powerful of them all, holding politicians, police, and the people of the Five Points in his tightly clenched fist. Amsterdam gains power and notoriety through his association with Bill and he becomes something of a celebrity figure in the Five Points, seen as an up-and-comer in the power structure of the neighborhood. The two enemies share an uneasy alliance through much of the film, but when Bill discovers Amsterdam’s true identity, they must square off in bloody combat, their personal vendetta backlit by the raging fires of the infamous New York City draft riots of 1863.

This is an obvious oversimplification of the plot of Gangs of New York, but as I mentioned before, the movie is a sprawling epic that contains multiple subplots and diversions, many of which are ancillary to the story of Amsterdam and Bill, but which give the film incredible richness and depth. While I’ve heard some people say that they feel that Gangs of New York doesn’t justify its lengthy runtime, or that the romantic subplot between Amsterdam and Cameron Diaz’s female pickpocket, Jenny, is unwarranted and unnecessary, I can largely forgive the movie its indulgences. Gangs of New York is a historical epic, and, as such, it should be expected to be in-depth, dense, and bombastic, and Scorsese does a masterful job of balancing great action, suspense and intrigue, and human interest, all while telling a compelling tale about the roots of America and Americanism. The Five Points of the film is alive and vibrant, with sets built at Italy’s famed Cinecitta studios standing in for the 19th century streets of New York City. The camera navigates these sets and streets with aplomb, capturing nooks and crevices of society otherwise unnoticed, bringing them to life with Scorsese’s typical visual acumen and virtuosic style.

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Small moments and more intimate scenes in the film allow Scorsese to really show off some of his trademark tracking shots and his mastery of setting and lighting, such as the absolutely gorgeous candlelit dance scene in which Jenny and Amsterdam finally submit to their obvious initial attraction to one another. The camera becomes a character in the scene, perfectly partnering with the twirling couples, moving in and out of the crowd on a dolly, and capturing the woozy, off-kilter nature of a rare night of revelry and respite for the tired and oppressed working class citizens of the Five Points. Though it might not be the most integral scene to furthering the film’s primary plotlines, it’s an essential break for the characters and for the audience, and it’s a moment of pure cinematic beauty.

The most obvious and immediate example of Scorsese’s visual genius in Gangs of New York is on display right from the film’s outset. The film opens with a lengthy tracking sequence that introduces most of the film’s principal characters, as well as the world that the film depicts, one that is defined by might and cunning, and sheer force of will. The shot follows Priest Vallon and a very young Amsterdam as they prepare for a bloody battle between the gang of Irish immigrants, the Dead Rabbits, led by Vallon, and a xenophobic, Nativist gang led by Bill the Butcher. Though it isn’t constructed as a single tracking shot, like some of Scorsese’s most famous sequences, the camera moves along with the boy and his father, panning and tracking to pick out the faces of important supporting characters who will fight alongside Vallon. The edits are well placed, and concealed somewhat by useful sound/image matching with the martial drum and fife tune underscoring the scene. Intensity builds as Scorsese introduces whip pans and cut-aways into the montage, picking out the grim faces and fearsome homemade weapons wielded by the Dead Rabbits as they march out of their subterranean base of operations. Fires burn alongside the stone walls and characters engage in strange, ritualistic dances, giving the setting an otherworldly feeling. As Vallon and his army emerge from the caves, the camera tilts up, revealing them to be beneath a bustling common house peopled by the denizens of the Five Points: degenerates, outcasts, and thieves, all living and existing on top of one another in a constant state of chaos and squalor. When the door is burst open and the camera tracks outside of the building, revealing an empty, snowy courtyard, the music drops from the soundtrack entirely and the audience is left on seat’s edge, anticipating the battle to come. The battle is a thing of violent beauty, but it is this initial sequence that truly expresses the efficiency of Scorsese’s visual language. He reveals a distinctive setting, implies character relationships, and the stakes of the cinematic universe into which the audience has been dropped, all through the use of music, montage, and camera movement in just a few short moments. It’s a sequence that can stand up to nearly in in Scorsese’s long and accomplished body of work.

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The film’s veracity and impact is also benefited by the incredible cast that was assembled to portray the residents of the Five Points. Obviously the film’s leads are accomplished and noteworthy, but the depth of this ensemble cast is one of Gangs of New York’s biggest strengths. Great actors such as John C. Reilly, Jim Broadbent, and Brendan Gleeson all show up in secondary roles. Broadbent’s Boss Tweed is appropriately corrupt and despicable, while Reilly takes a rare turn as an unlikable character. He does bring a level of complexity to the character of Happy Jack, who began the film standing beside Priest Vallon but who becomes a police officer, effectively working to support Bill’s stranglehold over the Five Points, as do many of the former Dead Rabbits, putting their own personal survival before their allegiances to their dead leader. Gleeson is McGloin, and though he begins the film as a mercenary, he proves to be one of the few characters who remains loyal to the ideals of the Dead Rabbits and of dignity for immigrants, but Gleeson plays him as a shady background character, potentially duplicitous, until his true nature is revealed late in the film. Though his performance is incredibly brief, with his character dying in the film’s first scene, Neeson brings a gravitas to his portrayal of Priest Vallon that lends a credence to his son’s and others’ dedication to the preservation of his character’s ideals. These secondary roles all work to create a rich tapestry of characters inhabiting the Five Points, giving the neighborhood of the film life and vigor.

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Of course, for all the important work that the film’s supporting cast do, their performances are all, naturally, overshadowed by Day-Lewis’s iconic and memorable portrayal of the cruel, powerful Bill Cutting. By now, Day-Lewis is widely recognized as one of the best actors of his, or any, generation, and though he had been turning in brilliant performances for over a decade by the time he starred in Gangs of New York, I think that it was this performance that largely cemented his status as an icon. I had seen My Left Foot and The Crucible in high school, but it was Day-Lewis’s work in creating the character of Bill the Butcher that truly signaled his greatness to me. Stories abound of the actor’s persistence to maintain character during a shoot, adhering to the mannerisms, accents, and affectations of his roles at all hours of the day, and that dedication shines through in every second of screen time that he has in Gangs of New York. Day-Lewis steals every scene that he’s in, chewing the scenery and spitting verbose prose in an unmistakable and unforgettable proto-New York City accent. He seethes and rages, he cajoles and charms, and all the while he maintains a fearsome physical presence that hints at his character’s capacity for lethal violence. Bill the Butcher is an all-time great villain, and it’s impossible to imagine him being played by anyone else. Day-Lewis breathes life and menace into the character, achieving a total transformation that would prefigure the all-consuming performances that he would turn in later in his career. Though his xenophobic and racist rhetoric and penchant for abuse and violence are abhorrent, Bill the Butcher’s charms make him an irresistible villain, if not a relatable figure. A lesser actor might not have tapped into the complexity of Bill Cutting, playing him as either purely evil or as a grandstanding raconteur, but the devil is in the details, and Day-Lewis creates a nuanced, attractive devil out of a performance dominated by attention to minutiae.

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Understandably, DiCaprio and Diaz don’t fare as well in the shadow of the powerhouse performance that Day-Lewis turns in. Though he provides a serviceable performance as Amsterdam, DiCaprio was still attempting to grow into more adult roles after spending much of the 1990s firmly entrenched as America’s teen heartthrob. His chops would improve in later collaborations with Scorsese and as he became more comfortable with his own artistic voice, but DiCaprio in Gangs of New York is still a bit raw, and his acting lacks a sense of naturalism. For whatever reason, I’ve also felt that DiCaprio’s vocal cadence isn’t suitable to lengthy, expository voiceover tracks, and Gangs of New York relies heavily on his narration. This could be a knock against Scorsese, as well, whose trademark voiceover narration I often find well done despite my overall distaste for the technique as a storytelling device, but in Gangs of New York it largely feels unnecessary and overwritten.

I’ve heard a lot of criticism of Diaz as the film’s love interest and female lead, but I actually think that she does a fine job. She has a natural wryness to her star persona that plays well with Jenny’s penchant for petty crime and her playful courtship of Amsterdam, and Diaz is also more than effective when searching out the emotional depths of the character. Though she doesn’t often shine in the movie, she makes the most of her moments in the film, and isn’t given as much material to work with as either of the male leads in building up her character. Jenny feels more like a glorified supporting character than a third co-lead, through no real fault of Diaz’s. I think that she and DiCaprio acquit themselves fairly admirably, but it would be impossible for either of these young actors to really emerge as a standout in a movie that is so thoroughly dominated by Day-Lewis.

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Gangs of New York isn’t a movie that I get to rewatch very often, given my penchant for only really liking to watch movies in a single sitting, and its long runtime frequently being prohibitive of that practice. I think I’ve probably seen it four times, including watching it on the Fourth of July in preparation to write this post, and it has always struck me as a film that speaks to Scorsese’s ongoing later-career interest in depicting how powerful men and their belief systems have formed the idea of Americanness. These themes stretch back to his crime films like Goodfellas and Casino, which both explicitly position themselves as commentaries on the shape of the American dream, but I think that it becomes even more explicit in films like Gangs of New York and The Wolf of Wall Street. I think that it’s fairly clear from his cinematic output that Scorsese has a somewhat pessimistic view of human nature, choosing, as he does, to highlight the seedier and more vicious elements of the human existence. In later films, he begins to expand that line of thinking out to examinations of American society and history, as a whole, and his outlook is no more favorable. In Gangs of New York, the very idea of Americanness is at the heart of the central conflict, with Vallon and the rest of the film’s immigrants attempting to stake their claim to a new identity in their chosen home against the wishes of Nativists like Bill the Butcher. This conflict is all set against the backdrop of the Civil War, a conflict that challenged the very notion of a national character for the young United States of America, and the film sees several characters, most prominently Bill, make impassioned speeches against the Union cause and against the emancipation of African-American slaves. Bill the Butcher as the film’s central character and his catalytic force in the narrative embodies and expresses these most savage and base fears and prejudices and the New York City that he attempts to influence and form in his image is a place that is heavily informed by his xenophobia, racism, and authoritarian nature. I think that Scorsese would posit that these virtues are, in many ways, at the core of the history of the American nation.

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It isn’t difficult to see why watching this film on Independence Day felt, for me, ironic, and why it also seems so totally prescient in 2018. Many of the struggles that are depicted in the film seem to be emerging as major narratives in the ongoing discussion of what it means to be an American in the 21st century. First and foremost, the unambiguous xenophobia and racism expressed by Bill and the film’s other Nativist characters has persisted for centuries in America, and has now emerged as a cornerstone in major mainstream political discourse. The face of immigration has certainly changed over the 150 years since the events depicted in Gangs of New York, but the conversation pertaining to closing borders to ensure the “purity” of the American character is exactly the same, and is couched in the same racist and exclusionary rhetoric that is on display in the film. The irony of a group of white, Anglo- settlers calling themselves Native to the Americas is an exclusionary argument still in use today that misses the point that anyone who is non-Indigenous can’t claim to have a birthright to Americanness, but it is the argument that forms the central basis of a form of economic and social White Supremacy that are hard baked into the American character. The roots of this attitude extend much further into history than the period depicted in Gangs of New York, but it is not by accident that Scorsese has selected a period of fraught racial turmoil to examine the formations of the American identity.

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The film also depicts the corruption and vice that were central to New York City’s civic governance by featuring Boss Tweed, the Tammany Hall political machine, and their ties to a criminal underworld that helped to prop up their status and ensure their political and social dominance. Throughout human history a desire for power and status has led humans to corruption and to choose strange allies. New York City in the mid-19th century certainly wasn’t the first or last locality to open itself up to this sort of political corruption, but the levels of civic betrayal and political ruthlessness and operational incompetence on display in the film, and which are apparently factually accurate, are astounding. The film depicts volunteer fire departments run by warring civic political factions that get so wrapped up in preventing each other from gaining credit for putting out the fire that they allow a building to burn to the ground. This level of ineptitude and hubris could only bring to mind the current political landscape in America, where corruption and deceit seem to be the order of the day, and service to the electorate is an unfortunate hindrance to the acquisition of capital at their expense. In the Super-PAC and special interest era of American politics, it feels more than ever that politicians and corporate structures are inextricably wedded in a marriage that aims to keep the non-elite from gaining any political power or capital. Though the disenfranchisement and squalor shown in the Five Points is extreme, the economic striation currently on display in America is not far off from that reality. Though Scorsese couldn’t have foreseen the levels of blatant graft and corruption that American politics have descended to barely 15 years after the film’s release, there’s no denying the parallels the film’s gilded era political machinations have to today’s political circus.

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Gangs of New York probably doesn’t rate up with the top tier of Scorsese’s filmography, but it does mark an important shift in his focus at the beginning of the 21st century and a return to form after a couple of less-than-great efforts to close out the 20th century. It’s a film that has largely been remembered as a mixed bag defined by an all-time great performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, but I think that it offers much more than that for modern viewers. Cinematically, it offers some of Scorsese’s most painterly compositions, and it’s obviously a deep well of his signature visual style, plus it also features one of the earliest performances from adult Leonardo DiCaprio that pointed towards the future quality of his performances. Socially and culturally, it’s an important film that I think will remain relevant as long as Americanness is so readily defined along lines of race and class. It’s a movie that seeks to answer the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” and it depicts the deadly struggle on many sides to secure the right to uphold the proper definition of Americanness. This is still a debate that rages on today, perhaps even more fiercely than it has in previous eras, and for that reason alone watching Gangs of New York is a must in 2018.