Gangs on trial

Gˆtterdˆmmerung, though, it is not. Wagner's creation dealt in gods. Scorsese's picaresque canvas, huge on spectacle, is mean on mankind. It is a movie whose own curse is to offer audiences absolutely no one, not a single character, with whom they can empathise, root for or care for.

It's a work of auteurship that exists on the very highest level of craftsmanship, but delves continuously into the lowest depths of humanity.

Only when violence is being factored into its fearsome set-pieces does it provoke response - most likely, revulsion. Knives are twoedged weapons of fascination in a film-maker's hands: more often than not, they alienate film-goers.

And there's a lot of ugly cutlery in Gangs of New York. This is the total American movie: confrontation is its in-built imperative. Nothing else. Its personal story never rises to match in magnitude or pathos the historical events of the time when the rest of America was fighting the Civil War, the Union dead were being smuggled back to the city under cover of night in wooden coffins, the "body bags" de ces jours, and a nation was being forged in fraternal enmity.

All that's consummated in Gangs of New York is a blood feud with funeral auspices far beyond its petty importance. Gone With the Wind, for all its romantic clichés, reflected the scope of historical destiny in the fates of its characters. Gangs of New York has only the vengeful acts of adversaries imprisoned in civic disorder and their own manias.

The massacred Priest's child, now grown into Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), returns after 17 annealing years in an orphanage, attaches himself to Bill the Butcher, who's unaware of the blood-tie with his tribal enemy, and bides his time for revenge. And that's about it: a weakling story that needs all the blood transfusion it can get in order not to disappear entirely amid Scorsese's bountiful fascination with the bigger corpus of criminal New York.

The set-pieces, superbly constructed by editor Thelma Schoonmaker, are what fill eye, mind and screen: the fire-brigades made up of brigands who use the flames as cover to loot the dwellings; the rat fights in brawling taverns; the Chinese music-hall and opium dens; the cadavers sold to anatomists for medi- ; the plunder of foreign vessels on the East River; the bareknuckle fights; and the lip-licking relish for the philology of thiefdom that's testimony to Scorsese's multitudinous research.

But too much period archaeology is performed at the expense of character psychology. The scenes are over-populated and over-active to a degree that betrays a director's anxiety about holding his spectators' attention. Bertolucci in his diorama of Italian nationhood, 1900; Visconti in The Leopard; even Coppola in The Godfather: all knew when to pause and listen for the moment of history. The din of battle drowns that out in Gangs of New York.

Significantly, its rare stretch of comparative peace and moral disquiet is the most memorable: when a hungover Butcher sits by Amsterdam'sbed in a bordello and muses on the existential nature of his rule, the film temporarily finds its way into a genuine heart of darkness. Day-Lewis is superb. It's his film: that's evident even in the trailer that parcels prominence out to the stars according to contract billing.

It's amazing he is so effective, for Bill the Butcher is one-dimensional, a comic-horror cut-out of stagy villainy in a stovepipe hat and tight plaid trousers that elongate his rakish form and lend a satanic pride to his bandy walk. He is a dandy dressed for the abattoir. But he looks, feels, sounds superhuman.

His demonstration of how to use a knife on a man - employing a pig's carcass as a clone for human flesh - is enough to turn one vegetarian. His knife-throwing act when he nips and tucks his blades around Cameron Diaz, who's cast in an under-written role as Jenny Everdeane, a pickpocketing hussy, is a thrilling piece of sheerly gestural malevolence.

His torture of DiCaprio after his failed assassination bid goes far, far further than you expect. He threatens to make lamb chops of him, sending his favourite meat cleaver spinning into the air above the supine lad and speculating where it might land: "Limbs ... or loins?

DiCaprio cannot match this display of dramatic pyrotechnics, but in his wisdom, does not try. The dimpled star of Titanic has grown into a beefy young man who lets Day-Lewis's raging psychosis break on him like a wave, but not dislodge him. Romance hasn't a hope of coming out top in a film entirely dedicated to the predatory hatred of one ethnic group for the next lowest: micks, prods, chinks and niggers, with cops at the bottom of the heap. Appropriately, what DiCaprio and Diaz share is not mutual passion, but a collection of scars: his from knife fights, hers from a Caesarean. Some love bites.

After DiCaprio's humiliation and comeback, the film has trouble getting its second dramatic wind and only does so when the bigger storm of the four-day Draft Riots, caused by enforced conscription of the poor into the Union army, nearly destroys all New York. It's of dubious advantage. It underlines how the city was then a hotbed of bigotry and racism, pro-slavery and prolynching, rabidly opposed to Abraham Lincoln's liberalism.

The amazing scenes of civic destruction that Scorsese recreates, and validates with contemporary illustrations - with shells fired by off-shore ships screaming overhead, blacks being lynched and Union troops leaving a top layer of corpses on the cobbles - only serve to remind us that this is a story populated entirely by the worst, the ugliest and the most unredeemed specimens of humanity.

Shocking, impressive and viscerally exciting as Gangs of New York is, such a climax provides a context that diminishes it morally. For all Scorsese's craftsmanship and vision, for which he must be admired, this is a dossier that deconstructs a worthless society solely in the pursuit of mano a mano vengeance. The Big Apple may indeed have had a rotten core at one harvest or another. But more than bloodshed must surely have irrigated its soil.

Gangs Of New York
Cert: 18