Gangs of New York suffers against the grain of its de-spiriting cacophonics, and immediately I am opposed to its ambulatory wastrels, who are hoarded for the thrill of sharing an interminable, expository hue, like someone decided to gauge fetters with a tuning fork. Whereas it goes living-breathing like a restless huff, its penniless barbarism serves a pretty dimwit consolation, and its tabernacle histrionics are crammed in just to subdue fits of, maybe, future pricing, apprising, soft-core domineering. It features a spineless cast of drudges and sewer newts and Irish spunk like it were aping a maimed tendon, playing its sumptuous and anguished histories like a great, collimated decoy. It is gilded and baroque, a fowl-tizzy—yet in the sense of undergarment warfare, rather than being concomitant and urbane. It gets indefatigably deadlocked in collecting its scrums and ravages, which, however, is unsurprising given its plot is like an outhouse, a place for privateer dribbles. I get the feeling it, like a sodden barnacle, has confused echolalia for egoic drive, and I wonder if I should feel bad for a movie. Bill the Butcher seems to stab wildly more for the reason of an internal revival of vapid or penurious shortcoming than for the corporeality of a mutual sacred place; he is so bad, in fact, that his specious broadcast comes off as injurious, like a slight from beyond the wall, and by the time of the film’s Chinese or Chinatown sycophancy distressing my ears I could no longer palate its cold, stingy exposure, could not stand its fetid, sunken overture to espousal of myriad mutinies between broodless ilk, with their crass, crossed-over, disappointing, seamster dialectic. My failure to watch at some indifferentiable point actually libidinalized the film’s inept, noxious, cruciform current, attuning it rather preferably to its skeletal gravitas, in which more than anything (with true cached, bohemian anality), knives are more held to than guts; postures, than pains; and blood, than bind. Gangs of New York made me think of many things: grease, baby hooligans, dietary restrictions, and of all simpering, equestrian, survivable, purportedly orthogonal places, Oregon, with its involvement of pre- and post-virtues—but not of lesser nor higher spirit, nor carnassial lust, and much less hide, fortitude, or even a scandalous, diseased historical trial prior to our present societal bliss, showing that sometimes it is just—and only—good for things to be over.
Gangs of New York (2002)
