Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz
Director: Martin Scorsese
Studio: Miramax 57033
Video: 2.35:1 anamorphic/enhanced for 16:9, 1080p HD
Audio: English Uncompressed 5.1 PCM, English, French DD 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH, French
Extras: Costume design featurette, Set design featurette, History of The Five Points, Exploring the sets of Gangs of New York, U2 music video, “Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York” (Discovery Channel Special), Audio commentary by Martin Scorsese, Theatrical trailer, Teaser trailer.
Length: 166 minutes
Rating: *****
Having missed this back in 2002 even though it got ten Academy Award nominations and won two Golden Globe awards, I was looking forward to seeing how Blu-ray delivered the huge crowd scenes which I had heard about in the film. Well, very well indeed! The gigantic massed humanity is displayed with a clarity and detail that is breathtaking.
Who knew that New York City in the 1860s was such a violent and gang-ridden place? The film opens with a sort of quick tour of the underbelly of New York of the period, without any opening titles. The almost constant street warfare is between the “Natives” gang led by the brutal knife-welding “Butcher” Mr. Cutter – who would like to see all the Irish, Chinese and Negros immigrants dead, and the Irish “Dead Rabbit” gang led by Amsterdam Vallon, who seeks revenge on Cutter for killing his father in gang warfare when Vallon was a child. Scorsese gives us a different view of the period’s history than we had in school, including the shocking effects of the Civil War. The Draft Riots of 1863 are shown from the inside out. As another reviewer observed, this is American history written in blood.
In the long-continuing primal hostilities between Cutter and Vallon which are at the heart of the plot, Daniel Day-Lewis comes off the winner acting-wise – in a meaty Mad Dog role not that different from the one he just won an Oscar for in There Will Be Blood. DiCaprio is unconvincing. But the atmosphere of New York in the 1860s is palpable, the gang warfare scenes are stunning, and the uncompressed 48K surround tracks do some interesting things with voices as well as sound effects. They move around the viewer, which practice had been abandoned ever since the first few Cinemascope movies, with every bit of the dialog now confined to the center channel. Perhaps with all that plus the fantastic visual clarity of this Blu-ray edition the original nay-sayers of Scorsese’s production may be convinced otherwise this time around, in spite of some acting disappointments.
– John Sunier
