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I was a comparatively late convert to the ranks of Martin Scorsese’s acolytes. Much as I admired Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, I couldn’t rid myself of the conviction that Scorsese was exorcising his Catholic conscience at my expense.
It was After Hours, his satire on boho customs and conventions in New York’s SoHo that finally did it for me. I have no idea if I would still find it funny. I suspect not, judging from the video clip I watched on YouTube the other day – but at that stage, it was enough.
Gangs of New York: the cinematic equivalent of a tabloid paper.Credit: Janet Briggs
And by the time I got to Goodfellas, with its gallows humour, its galloping pace and Scorsese’s mastery of the long take, I had become a true believer. He had even done the seemingly impossible and restored the status of the voice-over narration, previously dismissed by purists as a creaky old literary device.
For me, he was shaping up as a brilliant chronicler of America’s many tribes. He had started with the country’s Gangsterland, steeping himself in the politics of the Mafia. Now, he was moving on.
With his adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence – a book I loved – he showed that he could immerse himself in a much more rarefied atmosphere, one conditioned by the distinctions between new and old money in the rapidly changing New York society of the 1870s.
Then he plunged back into the underworld with Gangs of New York (2002), and my disillusionment set in. The film earned 10 Oscar nominations, and its failure to secure even one win was greeted by fans as the most egregious Oscar snub in history. Over 20 years later, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon scored the same number of nominations and missed out completely, too.
Leo puts ’em up.Credit: Miramax Films
They are very different films, however. While it’s true that Killers perpetuates Scorsese’s abiding preoccupation with tribalism, it is a world away from Gangs in pitch, tone and looks. Killers’ flaws lie in its ponderousness and its excessive solemnity. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a broadsheet, while Gangs is a tabloid – a shamelessly brash and overblown melodrama that can’t quite decide how serious it wants to be.
Scorsese had been wanting to make it for two decades before he finally got the chance. It all started when he came across journalist Herbert Asbury’s florid tales of the New York underworld in the lead-up to the Civil War.