Gangs of New York (18)

A rougher, bloodier, saltier cut

Nothing in recent cinema is remotely as strange, as dazzling, as downright unexpected as the opening of Martin Scorsese's new film. In a sequence half dream, half creation myth, Liam Neeson's Irish chieftain leads his people, the so-called Dead Rabbits, to battle the forces of Satan under Daniel Day-Lewis. Armed with clubs, axes and steel claws, this ragged legion strides out with leather helmets and mud-daubed faces to the sound of fife and drum; surging up from the bowels of the earth, they're straight from prehistory, or from some post-apocalypse sci-fi story of the Mad Max school. After their battle in a snowy waste against Bill's top-hatted tribe, the camera pulls back into the skies to reveal an oddly familiar stretch of landscape; the caption reads, "New York City, 1846". It's almost as much a shock as seeing the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. Make no mistake, Gangs of New York is no average historical drama.

The film's long gestation, and Scorsese's much-publicised differences with producer Harvey Weinstein, have led to expectations either of a towering masterpiece or an outright debacle. Gangs of New York is neither, and while it is riddled with lapses of judgement (some of them, I suspect, Weinstein's rather than Scorsese's, though who can tell?), the film is so energetic and exuberant, so vast and darkly inventive that you have to take it as it comes: as a monstrous, febrile phantasmagoria.

Based on the underworld chronicle by Herbert Asbury, this is a three-ring circus of a movie, a rambling, blood-thirsty Victorian serial given supercharged expressionistic treatment. In its simple revenge plot, the murderous warlord Bill the Butcher (Day-Lewis), leader of the American Nativists, defeats "Priest" Vallon (Neeson) and his Irish immigrant gang. Fourteen years later, Vallon's little son has grown into the vengeful young blood Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio). Adopted as Bill's henchman and surrogate son, Amsterdam falls for Jenny (Cameron Diaz), a "bludget" (pickpocket) and "turtle dove" (burglar posing as a housemaid): there's richly arcane vocabulary here for those with the "sand" (or nerve) to keep up.

The main action takes place only a decade before Scorsese's other tale of old New York, The Age of Innocence. Yet Gangs could be set on another planet: though we glimpse that film's opulent uptown, here the action is concentrated around the notorious, long-vanished Five Points area. The film's great glory is its creation of a self-enclosed world, an infernal maze of wood, stone and grime created by designer Dante Ferretti on the soundstages of Rome's Cinecittà. Whether or not such furnace-lit caverns ever existed under old Manhattan, with inmates grappling in stacked wooden cages, the film evokes a lost world as apocryphal as Atlantis: a lurid inferno of theatres, Chinese brothels and shanty bars where drinks are free in exchange for a severed ear slapped on the counter.

And what a population – women with filed teeth, homunculi in fancy waistcoats, florid-faced grandees, dressed with effusive wild humour by costume designer Sandy Powell. Presiding over it all is Day-Lewis under a greasy fringe and blood-curdling handlebar whiskers: his Bill, glass eye engraved with an American eagle, is one of the few really solid characters here, a mixture of Bill Sykes, Captain Hook and a panto demon king, especially when roaring into view astride his own fire engine. Day-Lewis may chew the scenery, though God knows there's plenty of scenery to chew: working a feral chin in apparent homage to Robert De Niro, he laces his accent with juicy cadences of Peter Falk and Jimmy Durante. His Bill is a cruel, attention-grabbing comic, and his showy aside in a knife-throwing routine – "Whoopsy daisy!" – is at once the film's funniest and most spine-chilling moment.

It may seem there are few fully-rounded characters here, but in fact Scorsese's casting of exotic grotesques draws on a notion of character straight from the 19th-century novel, with people presented as passions and appetites, expressing their selves physically or through language. The most realistically fleshed-out figure is Jim Broadbent as the corrupt politico William Tweed, while other players include the potato-faced John C Reilly, and Gary Lewis as a squat angry terrier of a thug. By comparison, DiCaprio and Diaz, with their more muted jauntiness, are no more than adequate: DiCaprio, scowling under the hair and dirt, is still puppyish, hardly a warrior prince on the rise, while Diaz's Jenny, though sly and fiery, isn't much more than a souped-up version of Nancy in Oliver Twist.

Scorsese's grander intent is to undertake a social archaeology of his city and, by extension, of America; this vision of US history is dyspeptic even by his standards. You can see that Miramax might have been nervous about the film, not least because the New York Fire Department is shown to have evolved from a mass of rival factions specialising in looting and internecine combat. Electioneering, too, is entirely rancid. "The ballots don't make the results, the counters make the results. Keep counting", says Tweed – a method that stands US presidential candidates in good stead to this day.

The film's most politically telling image shows newly arrived Irish immigrants stepping onto the quayside, instantly drafted into Lincoln's army and shipped out to battle, as a fresh consignment of coffins is unloaded onto the dock. America's mythic melting pot is depicted instead as a production line converting fresh meat into cannon fodder. The American national industry of entertainment also emerges badly, with founding showman P T Barnum up to his elbows in brutal prize-fighting and even pimping.

At the same time, the film offers a contradictory message: ostensibly a hymn to the indomitable energy of the crowd, the film climaxes in the Draft Riots of 1863, a reaction to Civil War conscription. We see an orgy of rampant destruction, including the lynching of blacks; suddenly the vibrant throng has become a brutal reactionary mob. It's a confused picture, though true to the 19th-century literary imagination: for decades after the French Revolution, the People could be at once lionised and demonised, often by the same writers. Ultimately, though, Gangs is less about history than about myth, or the end of myth – a downtown Götterdämmerung, in which the gangs' long-awaited final showdown is upstaged by the bigger battles of history.

Gangs is more than memorable as spectacle, and as a simmering brew of filmic echoes, veering from Les Enfants du Paradis to Kurosawa to Paint Your Wagon. But unlike other Scorsese films, it doesn't hold up too well as a coherent, complex text: a messy voice-over seems to have been added to guide us around, and the overall structural looseness seems the effect of hasty abridging. We also see surprisingly little of the exotically-named titular gangs – the Shirt Tails, Plug Uglies, Swamp Angels et al – although you imagine that, given the chance, Scorsese would have regaled us with detail for hours. It's hard to tell just how much his ambitions have been Harveyed, licked into less extreme shape by a notoriously interventionist producer; certainly there are some editing touches so uncharacteristic of Scorsese that you can only imagine him and editor Thelma Schoonmaker wincing at the result. Time may reveal Gangs to be as studio-scarred as Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons; then again, perhaps the film Scorsese dreamed of would have been even more unruly.

As it stands, Gangs of New York reads at best like Moby Dick with pages randomly torn out. Even so, it remains a breathtakingly strange, genuinely savage vision: in its aspirations at least, the Apocalypse Now of frock-coat drama. Too bad if it's ragged and misshapen; if you want a neat, polished package, there's a Spielberg along in a couple of weeks. This is a rougher, bloodier, saltier cut of meat altogether.

j.romney@independent.co.uk