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Gangs of New York
Dir Martin Scorsese
Certificate 18, 168 minutes
Review first published at fish.co.uk
Gory Gory Hallelujah
This magnum opus from Scorsese, Hollywood's master of blood and testosterone, starts with a huge gory battle between rival gangs in 1846 for control of the notorious Paradise Square. The Native Americans are sworn to turf out the Irish immigrants - the Dead Rabbits - and vice versa.
But this is not cowboys and Indians, of course. The "Native Americans" are in fact WASP colonials, basing their immigration policy on the principle of The Land Is Ours Because We've Been Here Longest (Not Counting The Ones Who Were Here Before Us). How things have changed in a century and a half.
However, before the battle can begin, there are preparations: weapons primed, protective clothing applied, and the Lord invoked to give each side victory over the other - a tough one even for the deity, one might think.
Leader of the Irish, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) gives his five-year-old son his St Michael medallion, reminding him to pray to the warrior angel, because it was he who cast Satan out of Paradise, as the Dead Rabbits are about to do. They receive the body of the Lord and go out to make another pleasing sacrifice, praying "May the steel of the Holy Spirit be in my spine, and the love of the Blesed Virgin in my soul."
Across the square, the Protestants do the same thing in their own way. So when the two armies come face to face, the Natives' leader, Butcher Bill (Daniel Day Lewis) cries, "Let the Christian Lord guide my hand!".
"Prepare to receive the true Lord!" replies Vallon, drawing his knife from its Celtic-cross sheath. And so the carnage starts.
Gangs of New York is about plenty of other things besides religion and violence - honour and violence, democracy and violence, masculinity and violence, race and violence, violence. But the relationship between religion and violence runs through the film like a vein always just below the surface and continually bursting forth.
On release from his orphanage, Vallon's son Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) is given a Bible and told to forgive his enemies; his first action is to toss it in the sea. A policeman sent by Butcher Bill to hunt him down is found crucified. Characters quote the Bible at each other, and every brutal and lawless deed is dressed in and empowered by faith. The biblical Joshua would have fitted in just fine.
Scorsese is not making the rather blunt point that religion causes violence. No one here actually kills for their faith - the gangs are fighting purely for territory, and are divided along racial rather than theological lines.
So then why is religion so important to them, if they have so little interest in what we might think of as Christian behaviour?
Amsterdam's answer is "Our faith is the weapon most feared by our enemies." The conviction that God hates whom they hate and will answer their prayers of vengeance is a source of strength, hope and courage in their killing.
It would be easy enough to ridicule religion on this basis - a shallow hypocritical facade - but the film actually has considerable sympathy for those who pray with axe in hand, and perhaps we too should pause before condemning their bloody version of Christianity.
Consider one outstanding moment in this outstanding film: as the Irish-Native battle is about to reprise at the end, we intercut between Amsterdam praying for vengeance, Butcher Bill praying for victory, and a wealthy father at the head of a sumptuous table praying for continued mercies.
Having spent so long in the brilliantly realised underworld (this is the great triumph of the film) amid lives of squalour and brutality, to be brought home to such luxury is a shock. But home it is. Scorsese forces viewers in the 21st-century west to recognise that we too are the privileged few. Shielded from such barbaric lives by our wealth and protected by military firepower, do we have any room to judge those who live by violence in the dirt?
And if it pleases us to attribute our material blessings to God, then how are we placed to look down on those who attribute their own struggle out of the depths to him?
From the gangs of New York to those of the Middle East, Scorsese offers us an important insight into why faith and violence get on so well.
the Lord is invoked
to give each side victory over the
other - a tough one even for
the deity, one might think