Oughts from the Aughts: Gangs of New York (2002)
My favorite underrated movies from the 2000s, explained in under 2010 words
Author’s Note: In “Oughts from the Aughts,” I’ll be exploring some of my favorite underrated, overlooked, or forgotten about films from the 2000s that you ought to watch or rewatch. The 2010 word count is an arbitrary but fun challenge to keep my verbose self in check. I’m also not applying it to this authors note for any sticklers for detail out there. This post also contains minor spoilers for Gangs of New York, which you’ve had 21 years to see, not that I’m counting.
"They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
-Donald Trump
“The appearance of the law must be upheld. Especially when it’s being broken.”
-Boss Tweed
As a young boy I was convinced that every film should begin with a battle the way college kids are convinced every night out should begin with shots. Having seen and loved the electrifying openings to 1999’s The Mummy and 2000’s Gladiator, it seemed like fighting was the only good way to start a movie. How else could I understand the stakes and characters other than cleverly choreographed combat over the triumphant trumpets of an action set piece?
So 12 year old me delighted at the fact that this Martin Scorsese historical epic also begins with a battle. This fight not only introduces us to the key players, it sets the tone for the film (grim, theatrical), establishes the key conflict (“native” Americans vs immigrants), and sets up the motivation that will guide the rest of the expansive 167 minute runtime (revenge for the results of this battle).
As we march towards this momentous skirmish, we meet the Dead Rabbits, a gang of Irish immigrants led by the patron saint of cinematic vengeance, Liam Neeson. He is holding a Celtic cross in one hand and a sword in the other, making Scorsese’s representation of the spirit of Irish immigrants the second least subtle one behind whoever the hell designed that Notre Dame football logo.
These fighting Irish, er Dead Rabbits, are also all wearing red so we can keep track of them. Their opponents are a band of nativist gangs, helpfully decked out in a shade of Cerulean so pure Meryl Streep would give an icy nod of approval. These blue-blooded, blue-shirted Americans are led by none other than Daniel Day Lewis as Bill the Butcher. Day Lewis has, by my reckoning, been retired his entire career, sneaking out to occasionally win an Oscar before returning to his life as a reclusive cobbler in Florence. The fact that his gang members are wearing top hats has the unintentional effect of making it look just as likely that they’ll burst into song as they will charge into battle. In truth, they are squaring off to decide which gang can lay claim to their neighborhood of the Five Points, and by extension New York City. It’s a mini civil war occurring in a country that is, non-coincidentally, about to enter a much larger, bloodier civil war.
The fact that the opening conflict is white Americans descended from English immigrants beating and stabbing white Irish immigrants tells you a lot. The battle isn’t about gang territory as much as it’s about who gets to be considered American. Even the color palette of the battle is red, white, and blue: a bunch of white people, some wearing red and some wearing blue, splashing red blood onto white snow. The imagery is about as subtle a weapon as the butcher’s clever that Bill uses in combat, yet hits home with the same bone-crunching effect.
The two sides slam together in a bloody struggle that’s sickening to witness and Neeson’s Priest Vallon is slain by Day Lewis’s Bill, orphaning the priest’s young son. We then flash forward and meet that son as an adult. Played by Leonardo DiCaprio, he is leaving the orphanage that raised him when, in this maximalist movie’s least subtle moment, he chucks a bible into a river in glorious slow motion presumably because it looks awesome, rechristening himself “Amsterdam.” With the certainty of Inigo Montoya he sets out to kill the man who killed his father.
This film belongs to an endangered genre: the historical epic. While they are very expensive to film (part of why they’re likely disappearing), historical epics are one of my favorite types of films to watch since they have many of the things I go to the movies for: battle sequences, period costumes, and going on a journey to a place I can’t see any other way. We had a good run of epics in the 90s, thanks to Braveheart. Then Gladiator’s critical and financial success gave us sword & sandal imitators like Troy and Alexander alongside deep dives into other time periods like The Last Samurai, Apocalypto, King Arthur, and 300. Hell, the movie that launched The Rock’s film career, The Scorpion King, was a sword & sorcery epic adventure that came out the same year this one did.
A sprawling epic like this can only land if the cast, costumes, and sets ground you in the period and Gangs of New York delivers in spades on this front. Highlights of the cast for me are Brendan Gleeson as club-wielding brawler (and later Sheriff) Walter McGinn, Jim Broadbent as corrupt politician Boss Tweed, and Liam Neeson (too briefly) playing Priest Vallon. Daniel Day Lewis, however, steals the show with his iconic performance of Bill the Butcher. The man has done some incredible characters over the years, but this one is my personal favorite. He brings an immensely unlikable man to life in such vivid detail that you’re fascinated by his every contour even while abhorring his worldview. An obvious casting lowlight is Cameron Diaz doing a terrible Irish accent that will haunt your dreams.
This movie unfolds in an oddly meandering, episodic way as Amsterdam explores New York and attempts to get close to Bill the Butcher so he can eventually kill him. It often feels like it could be a stage play, with all of the characters wandering in and out of the same few streets in lower Manhattan, seemingly always mere feet away from each other and their next conversation or confrontation. There is even a theatricality to the central struggle: Bill the Butcher re-enacts the murder of Amsterdam’s father every year at a Chinese theater while Amsterdam insists on killing Bill the Butcher with the exact knife used to kill his father.
One of the best scenes in the whole movie is a sequence by the New York docks. We overhear a debate between Tweed, who sees the newly arrived Irish as a political base he can mold and manipulate, and Bill, who sees them as trespassers threatening the Protestant soul of his America. As they wander amongst the docks arguing, a deft camera move shows us a ship of Irish immigrants arriving, a line of Irish men being pressed into military service for a Civil War they don’t understand, and another ship unloading coffins newly returned from the front. The camera takes a grim lap as an Irish woman sings “Paddy’s Lamentation,” a sad song whose lyrics, like the visual symbolism, are as subtle as Bill the Butchers’s top hat:
“But when we got to Yankee land, they shoved a gun into our hands
Saying "Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln"
There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar
And I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin”
Speaking of music, Howard Shore penned the score to this one while still working on the Lord of the Rings. While it’s incredibly evocative to hear in film, there is little of the charm or recognizable themes that we saw in his work on Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Shore’s original score still enriches this film, though not as much as the American and Irish folk songs that occur diegetically.
The drama boils over in the most interesting sequence from a historical standpoint: Scorsese’s depiction of the New York Draft Riots. This is a real historical event that I had never heard of in 2002. Seeing it brought to life for the first time felt like watching the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park: the fear, uncertainty, and violence felt that immediate.
As context, after president Lincoln declared a draft for the Union army during the Civil War, many in New York protested. Feeling disconnected from the war in the South, many working class New Yorkers had no desire to serve. They also objected to a loophole so classist it would bring Ted Cruz to orgasm: the wealthy could buy their way out of the draft for $300 ($6,600 in 2021). So, for three days in July, there were violent riots, killing 120 people and injuring 2,000. The riots quickly took on an ugly racial angle, with white rioters attacking and killing Black New Yorkers, including burning the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. The violence only ended when Union troops fresh from Gettysburg occupied New York and gunned down the protestors. This historical event brought together racial conflict, class conflict, and a conflict over the very soul of America in a way that even Scorsese couldn’t make any more dramatic.
What’s fascinating watching it unfold here is how the film’s central quest for revenge, which has been building for over two hours, ends up getting eclipsed by the draft riots. While Leo and Day Lewis do have the final showdown you’ve been anticipating, it’s not the tense duel you expect. It’s short, anti-climactic, and shrouded in dust from the explosions going on all around them. Leo gets his vengeance, and D-Day gets his violent brawl with the immigrants he despises, but we are left with the sense that both of these men are doomed chieftains. Their tribal struggles, while momentously important for them, are dwarfed by the Civil War and will be soon forgotten. More established political powers with larger armies and bigger war chests will quite literally pave over every last trace of them.
The Five Points, where this movie is set, is today on the edge of Chinatown in Southern Manhattan. The fact that the site of violent brawls over who gets to be American is now ringed by towering temples to investment banking, hip lofts, and popular dumpling shops and Dim Sum restaurants is perhaps the most American thing ever.
This is a movie about the making of New York as proxy for the making of America. The question of who gets to be called a “legitimate” American is one of the oldest and fiercest struggles this country has faced. It’s one we are still grappling with today. Amsterdam’s quest to have his Irish countrymen recognized as “true” Americans uses every tactic at his disposal: legal ones like winning elections and illegal ones like winning street brawls. Bill the Butcher uses every knife in his block to carve out the borders of his nativist vision of his country, defending it to the death from immigrants he sees as an existential threat. Yet we know their blood feuds will be forgotten the second society moves on from the Irish and demonizes the next group of outsiders. This film illustrates how the ephemeral “other” is an infinite horizon for the American identity; no matter who counts as “us,” we will always find a way to demonize a new “them.” What Scorsese is masterfully bringing to life is the process of defining and then defending whiteness.
Rewatching this film during COVID I was first struck by how much it feels like an early 2000s time capsule. It stars Cameron Diaz, U2 plays the closing credits song, and the final shot is literally a time lapse of downtown Manhattan that ends with the Twin Towers. Yet it also felt oddly more relevant than when I first saw it. The tortured struggle with racial justice, the rich exploiting the poor as political & military pawns, and the question of who counts as an American seem louder and more furious today than they did in 2002. While Gangs of New York is absolutely a 2000s historical epic set in the 1860s, it has in it timeless elements and thematic questions that define great cinema. Were I to watch it now, post January 6th, the draft riot scenes would be more upsetting than Cameron Diaz’s Irish accent.