Scorsese hopes for box office hit

10 April 2012

Martin Scorsese's long overdue and heavily over-budget period drama, Gangs Of New York, opened at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday. At least, 20 minutes of it did. In what its director called "An Extended Special Preview" - in less pompous terms, a super-trailer - a packed cinema watched the highlights of the film that will (completion permitting) open in the eponymous city on 25 December.

Judging by the amount of blood-letting in this sample, it's going to be a Red Christmas. The stars are Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz - both present and preening for the paparazzi - and Daniel Day-Lewis, who was an absentee at Cannes - but star power apart, it's the scar power of the weaponry in the film that focused eyes and had people flinching: cut-throat razors, meat cleavers, chopping axes and butcher's knives.

The theme of the film seems to be the inheritance of violence that shapes our ends "rough hew them how we may" - and there's plenty of rough hewing going on continually in Gangs Of New York. One scene shows opposing crowds charging each other with every kind of sharp blade and leaving a snowy

square in Old New York a mush of blood.

Whetting the appetite with this promo for a 164-minute movie apparently means whetting the cutlery. Cameron Diaz, playing a luscious pickpocket in the 1860s, is pinned by her spare flesh - pretty close to the bone, that is - by the knife-throwing act patented by Day-Lewis's villain in the street fights that have made him Bill the Butcher on this block.

In his stove-pipe hat, frock coat, mutton-chop sideburns and handlebar moustache, Day-Lewis is every inch the leering Victorian villain who takes DiCaprio, the greenhorn from the Emerald Isle, under his tutelage and makes him his heir-apparent.

One grisly scene shows the master instructing the raw beginner in how to carve up a pig's carcass - "the nearest thing to a human body", Day-Lewis kindly explains, plunging his blade into heart, liver, spleen and pork belly.

DiCaprio has filled out, grown a tidy beard round the rim of his chin to hide its babyish chubby look, but is still trying out a variety of Irish accents for fit.

No doubt the final-dub will anchor him phonetically in one part of Ireland: he's all over it at the moment.

But despite a heavy love scene with Diaz stripping DiCaprio to fondle and caress his manly scars, I'd put my money on Day-Lewis stealing the notices, if not the hearts of Leo's fans.

Day-Lewis has got the voice, the stature and the fearful hardware. Bare-knuckle fights, street riots - "the worst-ever in America", says Scorsese - gunpowder plots and an armada of 19th century sailing ships training their cannons on the Lower East Side: the "tired, the poor, the huddled masses" of immigrants work overtime to bring us a swarming fresco of New York history.

With 15,000 Irish immigrants arriving weekly in the US at this period, DiCaprio recruits them into his own private army and challenges Day-Lewis's rule of fear to establish what is to grow into the corrupt Irish regime of Tammany Hall politics.

"America was made in the streets" is likely to be the film's slogan on the posters. The emotions are those of a poster too: broad- brush and primary-hued. It's hard to see how Scorsese will insert any more nuanced interpretations of character into the film, though of course, like all trailers, the 20-minute preview we saw was simply a string of knockout punches.

Scorsese badly needs a box-office hit. If the film doesn't work out, this $160 million production could prove to be Miramax's Heaven's Gate - Michael Cimeno's bombastic flop that ruined United Artists two decades ago.

But at Cannes yesterday, Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein and his Gang looked as if they expected to be in the money.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in