Martin Scorsese spent 20 years trying to get Gangs of New York made. Miramax finally bought it in 1999. The film was completed by 2001, then held back when the September 11 attacks delayed its release. It opened in the United States on December 20, 2002 — and it started a collaboration between Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio.
It is a large, messy, often astonishing piece of work. It is also bloated in places, and its reach exceeds its grip more than once. The score is 7.2 out of 10, and that number feels honest: a flawed near-masterpiece from a director who has made actual masterpieces.
Trailer, via Miramax.
The Five Points and the Dead Rabbits
The film opens in 1846 in the Five Points, the notorious slum at the southern tip of the city. Two gangs square off outside the Old Brewery, the Dead Rabbits’ domain, to settle who controls the neighborhood. The Anglo-Protestant Confederation of American Natives is led by William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. The Irish Catholic Dead Rabbits are led by “Priest” Vallon, played by Liam Neeson.
Cutting kills Vallon in the brawl. He orders the body left untouched and declares the Dead Rabbits outlawed. Vallon’s young son watches, hides the knife that killed his father, and is shipped off to the Hellgate Orphanage on Blackwell’s Island.
Sixteen years later, in 1862, that boy returns as Amsterdam Vallon, played by DiCaprio. He wants revenge. He knows he cannot simply walk up to Cutting and take it. He has to get inside.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Long Game
Amsterdam retrieves the knife while the Metropolitan Police are evicting Irish tenants from the Old Brewery. He reconnects with Johnny Sirocco, played by Henry Thomas, who walks him through the local gang clans. All of them pay tribute to Cutting, who still runs the Five Points.
Amsterdam helps Sirocco loot a burning house one night. Cutting notices them. Amsterdam gets introduced, keeps his past buried, and works his way toward recruitment.
What he finds inside is uglier than he expected. Many of his father’s old lieutenants now work for Cutting — “Happy” Jack Mulraney, played by John C. Reilly, has become a corrupt Irish policeman, and McGloin, played by Gary Lewis, has signed on too. They serve a man who despises them.
Day-Lewis is the reason to watch this movie. His Cutting is a monster with a code, a nativist demagogue who genuinely believes he is the last honest man in a city being overrun. The performance was widely acclaimed on release, and it earned him a Best Actor nomination at the 75th Academy Awards. It is not a performance anyone else could have given.
Jenny Everdeane and the Tammany Hall Problem
Amsterdam falls for Jenny Everdeane, a pickpocket and grifter played by Cameron Diaz. Sirocco is infatuated with her too, which sets up a triangle the film never quite resolves with the weight it deserves.
As Amsterdam gains Cutting’s confidence, he gets pulled into the orbit of Boss Tweed, played by Jim Broadbent, and the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. This is where the movie’s ambitions get the better of it. The political material is real and important, but it competes with the revenge story for screen time, and neither thread gets the full attention it needs.
The cast around DiCaprio and Day-Lewis is deep:
- Jim Broadbent as Boss Tweed
- John C. Reilly as Happy Jack
- Henry Thomas as Johnny Sirocco
- Liam Neeson as “Priest” Vallon
- Brendan Gleeson as Walter “Monk” McGinn
- Gary Lewis as McGloin
- Stephen Graham as Shang
- Eddie Marsan as Killoran
- Alec McCowen as Reverend Raleigh
That is a serious bench. Gleeson and Graham, in particular, make strong impressions in small roles.
A City Built on Cinecittà
Scorsese shot principal photography at Cinecittà Studios in Rome and in Long Island City, New York. The Five Points set is enormous, and it holds up. This is a film that wants you to feel the mud, the crowding, the smoke, the sheer density of bodies.
The film runs 168 minutes. That is a long time, and it feels long in the middle stretch, where the plot moves in circles: Amsterdam gets closer to Cutting, then closer still, then has a crisis of conscience, then gets closer again. The screenplay, by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan, is adapting Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book The Gangs of New York. Three writers with distinct instincts, and you can feel the seams.
The film is set from 1846 to 1863, when a long-running Catholic–Protestant feud erupts into violence just as an Irish immigrant group protests the threat of conscription during the Civil War. The tagline — “America was born in the streets” — is doing a lot of work, but the movie earns it.
What the Awards Didn’t Fix
Gangs of New York received 10 nominations at the 75th Academy Awards. Best Picture. Best Director for Scorsese. Best Actor for Day-Lewis. It won none of them.
That shutout is the story of the film’s reception in miniature. The reviews were generally positive. Day-Lewis’s performance was highly acclaimed. But the film took home nothing, and the nominations themselves are the clearest measure of how the industry saw it: ambitious, admired in parts, not rewarded as a whole.
The box office told a different story. The film grossed $193.8 million worldwide. It also began the DiCaprio–Scorsese collaboration, which is arguably the most important thing this movie gave us.
The Verdict on Gangs of New York
Here is what matters: Day-Lewis. Everything else in Gangs of New York is in service of him, and when the film drifts away from Cutting, it drifts. DiCaprio is good, but he is playing a character who spends most of the runtime hiding, which limits what he can do. Diaz is given less to work with than the role needs. The Tammany Hall subplot is history worth telling, but it never coheres with the revenge spine.
What is noise: the runtime. 168 minutes is not automatically a problem — Scorsese has made long films that move like lightning. The problem here is that the middle hour repeats itself. Amsterdam’s infiltration has maybe three beats where it needs one.
What is worth watching: the world-building. The Five Points set, the gang politics, the way the film shows how ethnic hatred gets organized into power. Cutting’s anti-immigrant, racist politics are not background texture. They are the engine of the plot, and the film knows it.
This is a film that was 20 years in the making and arrived after September 11, in a city still grieving, telling a story about New York at its most violent and divided. It is a 7.2 out of 10. A major director swinging for something enormous, connecting often enough to matter, missing often enough to notice. The performance at its center is the reason it endures. The rest is a city, built on a soundstage in Rome, trying to hold itself together.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
