Gangs of New York
dir. Martin Scorsese
Miramax

I like the shores of America!/ Comfort is yours in America!/ Knobs on the doors in America/ Wall-to-wall floors in America!

This rousing song — sung by an immigrant, to an immigrant, about the Land of Liberty's plentiful opportunities — is not featured in Gangs of New York.

Also absent from the film are stirring cinematic odes to thrift, hard work and the tumultuous but ultimately marvelous melting pot that brings all the people from all the countries together for a rousing sing-along finish.

Instead, Gangs of New York offers its viewers the following bill of goods:

Dead Rabbits (metaphorical): A whole street-gang full

Dead rabbits (actual): Numerous

Dead pigs: At least two, one of which should get a "best cameo" nod from somebody

Guys impaled on a fence: One — and how!

Black guys lynched by a mob: Quite a few

Hot burny marks on a guy's face: One

Guys stabbed somewhere, typically the guts: A buhzillion

Rich folks beaten up, and how: Several

And so on, and so on. This is not a particularly nice film, and it documents a not particularly nice slice of American history in what may be New York's roughest neighborhood. Ever.

Ever since Gangs of New York began its slow, smouldering burn in American movie theaters, those few people not totally besotted by the caperings of elves and hobbits have had the chance to take a long, dirty drink of the brackish stuff that is raw history.

This isn't meant to imply that Gangs of New York is history's loyal servant; far from it. Characters are invented. Characters are transported through time in the name of drama. Historic events are conflated, accentuated, invented and deleted. It's a film, people.

But Gangs of New York does something brilliant, and daring, and — in the current political climate — something a little bit dangerous. It digs around in the ugly part of the American attic and puts flesh back on some of our most embarrassing skeletons.

You want racism? How about Irish immigrants lynching blacks, blaming them for a war whose draft they wanted to avoid?

You want street crime? How about a major metropolitan government run by criminals in silk suits employing knife-swinging gangsters?

You want class warfare? How about the Army firing cannons into a poor neighborhood in New York City to put down a riot by the municipality's poor?

The broad strokes are right. New York streets really were torn by gang warfare that could hold its head high beside the feuds of the Crips and the Bloods. Blacks really were torn apart by mobs. Those who couldn't pay their way out of the draft really were gathered, armed, and sent south into broad, rolling, grass-carpeted slaughterhouses.

But more important than just revealing these particularly ugly historical bloopers, Gangs of New York carries a deep, dark implicit message: Every decade has its closet of skeletons. Americans were not perfect, are not perfect and will never be perfect. We're not a race of mythical supermen, founded by omniscient demigods and climbing ever higher toward greater and greater degrees of democracy and equality. We're fallible human beings, fully capable of the barbarism that we tend to associate with developing nations where things have broken down.

By demythologizing the Civil War, with its traditional good-versus-evil (or, at the very least, wise versus flawed) template, director Martin Scorsese takes a shot at the ideas of America most of us hold sacred. The Union and its supporters did some terrible things. The North had its share of ugly racism. The war was far from clean; and the terms under which it was fought were far from fair.

And by injecting shades of gray into the palette of American history, Scorsese may induce thoughtful viewers to see similar nuances in the titanic clash of good versus evil du jour.

Scorsese is no historical nihilist; Gangs of New York has elements of hope and a forward motion toward civilization that is particularly evident after the film's armageddon-like ending. But his message is clear and important: Behind every great enterprise sits a field full of bones. And the stories they tell are far from simple, and far from pretty.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)