While I was eagerly awaiting the chance to see Daniel Day Lewis in ‘There Will Be Blood’ I decided to backtrack to revisit his scary as fuck portrayal of Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting in Martin Scorsese’s epic ‘Gangs Of New York’.
This is a movie that I wasn’t drawn to when it was first released in 2002. At that time I was bored with the feverish attention devoted to Leonardo Di Caprio who was being hyped like he was the new Robert De Niro. If anyone merits such a comparison it is Day-Lewis. He is an actor who, like De Niro at his peak, throws himself wholly into a role to physically embody a character. Di Caprio in contrast can never quite shed his boyish good looks. He acts tough but never looks menacing enough to be totally convincing. As Amsterdam Vallon in Gangs of New York, he is beaten to within an inch of his life by Cutter and burned on the face with a red hot blade but his recovery is miraculous to the point that he has only designer cuts and bruises.
It is Day-Lewis as a ruthless and brutal personification of evil who dominates this movie. There’s more than a little of music hall villainy about the way he plays this gang-leader with the permanently greasy hair, glass eye and vaguely comical costumes. There’s the walk too – he looks like his striped pants are cut just a little too snugly around the groin area.
There’s nothing comic about his aggression however. The barbaric butchery he unleashes on his rivals is gruesome and stomach churningly realistic. This cruelty he justifies on the grounds that only the “spectacle of fearsome acts” really fills opponents with dread.
In this regard, I couldn’t help making an analogy between this and the Bush administrations orchestrated spectacle of the ‘shock and awe’ attack on Iraq. The line in the movie that “war does terrible things to man” also has a contemporary relevance as do the movie’s vote rigging scenes where “counters make results not ballots” ; an echo of the Bush-Gore hanging shards debacle. I’m sure these associations are intentional, after all the movie’s tag line that ‘modern America was born on the streets’ indicates that Scorsese did not set out simply to give us an abstract lesson in history.
The movie is as much a Shakespearian study of the innate immorality of power struggles as it is a re-enactment of historical events. No-one choreographs male violence as well as Martin Scorsese but the exaggerated and unscrupulous roguery of Daniel Day-Lewis makes this more a showy example of method acting than a drama that works on its own terms.
