Director: Martin Scorsese. Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Liam Neeson, Hanry
Thomas, John C. Reilly, Jim Broadbent.
Production: Miramax.
Distribution: 20th Century Fox.
Year: 2002.
Length: 168 '.
Unparalleled investigator of street life and behavioral codes of the sub-urban cultures, Martin Scorsese has always been convinced that America, as stated in the trailer that accompanied the release of his film in Italy, was born in the streets. Therefore inevitable that the chronicles Herbert Ashbury in 1860 on the battles for control of New York neighborhoods and popular uprisings against the lever to turn the Civil War ended his delirious visual talent, more and more feverish and dusk. Here it is Gangs of New York, bloody and vaguely Shakespearean genesis of America today.
Gangs of New York is a violent film and frontal impact, "a work in black" that stuns the wild ruggedness of which is soaked and yet forces them to reflect and to question if indeed one is going to unravel, one after another, the many threads that Scorsese wraps on their titanic reel. Two of these threads have names and precise identity: they are called Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Bill Poe, better known as the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). They are the gang leaders of the Irish and Native Americans, tribal hordes which face each other in epic battles to be included ferocity, however, in the general context of a colossal struggle for survival that does not cover other method except the most barbaric violence. Scorsese is not accommodating, not at all interested in building or edifying didactic parables. His trademark sense in philosophical and formal, as we know, hyperbole. Excess. In Genesis Scorsese, in which there are suggestions of biblical character, to reign is only chaos, a chaos primordial. At Five Points intersection where five roads tangled, everything blends into a magma of ethnicities and social classes, sacred and profane, pity and vengeance, of reason and absurdity of rules written just for good living and legal of the strongest customarily applied in the streets. Good and evil do not exist, or rather, do not yet exist. Are being developed and determine the boundaries will be the winner, the one who will survive the final massacre described admirably by Scorsese as the "Big Bang social" which will give rise to America. It seems acceptable, at least to us Europeans (unless of course the Americans who have loved the film), the idea Gangs of New York which is a kind of slide that contains the germs have developed in America today, a melting pot of contradictions and where live the sanctimonious moralism and lasciviousness nihilistic individualism pushed and democracy, and the healthy vegetarian death penalty, the myth that even the most disadvantaged can make its way to the uninsured and health care denied. The America he has in mind Scorsese, to his training inclined to interpret life according to the Catholic sense of the "Valley of Tears", it is not good or bad. It 's just the order, the order was given that imperfect man to manage the pre-social chaos. Exemplary figure in this sense is the Butcher, Eater relentless and strong-willed but also "fair" and above all an organizer of the first, but a terrorist, a model of coexistence. Astonishing mastery of interpretation of reviving Daniel Day-Lewis, capable of detonating any primitive instinct in two occhiacci grinning and perpetually drunk with blood, madness and animal instinct of survival. Less restrictive but DiCaprio and Diaz especially, perhaps a little help from the only character of a weak screenplay that aspires, with moderate success all'onnicomprensione dostoevskiani novels and Tolstoy. As Scorsese said this is not a man and his conciliatory firmness intellectual moved intact to the screen through the grammar of a pitiless staging that did not retreat in the face of anything that dismembered fingers, knives to dismember bats that break through, lynching crowds and spectators who applaud condemned the hanging of four randomly selected from the urn of the miserable . And 'maybe because of this cruel and innocent poetic visual horror that the overwhelming accumulated throughout the film then dissolves in a thrilling final in which the background of two tombstones and a land made fertile by the blood of guilt now deleted , stands a symbol of the rough New York (injured) American. E 'by Martin Scorsese, after the metaphysical abstraction of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the second author's cinema epic on mankind. Yes, the human race, because, like it or not, America, a modern version of the biblical Babylon, is necessarily "the part for the whole" .* *
review of Alessandro Montanari
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