feeling listless

Film I now have a theory about Martin Scorsese. I think making a filmic history of gangs and gangsters in New York, and one of these days he’s going to do a Lucas and try and tie them all together, with ‘Gangs of New York’ at one end and ‘Goodfellas’ as the other. I hope he does because it might solve a few issues for me. Regular readers of my reviews will know I’ve never been friends with most of Scorsese’s gangster pictures. I’m probably the only man in the western spiral arm of the galaxy who doesn’t think the aforementioned ‘Goodfellas’ is a masterpiece, preferring his quieter more meditative pieces like ‘Last Temptation of Christ’ and ‘Age of Innocence’. Although I loved ‘Casino’, but I’m a paradoxical soul.

I think I liked ‘Gangs of New York’, possibly because it’s a mixture of the two. The gangsterism is there, but it’s underpinned by a kind of humanity. It’s certainly as good as anything he’s done. But it still won’t win an oscar. It doesn’t all quite fit together, and at some point you might feel like you’ve nodded off and missed half an hour. The motivations of some of the characters stop adding up and you’re left to let the film flow over you for a while until something happens which shocks you awake. This film could have been, should have been and probably was a lot longer. The couple of years in editing are all too evident.

Even at the running time it has it speeds past and I would have been please to have given it another hour so that it could make complete sense. For example its obvious we would have seen Di Caprio’s early years in the orphanage. They wouldn’t have hired a decent actor like Tim Piggot-Smith otherwise. And this happens time and again throughout the film. Really good recognizable actor given very little screen time. The footage we have here is the tip of the iceberg people. Don’t buy the DVD of this film straight away. There is bound to be a much better directors cut on sale six months later.