A Shout in the Street
by Chris Dashiell

Historical fiction at its best explores the hidden currents of the present time, revealing the intelligible form of culture and civilization. In our Age of Amnesia, audiences are in the habit of dismissing films that take place in the past as irrelevant costume dramas or escapist adventures. But, if the artist is wise enough, the vision is imparted, as it were, surreptitiously.

Martin Scorsese is cinema's great chronicler of New York, and of New York as symbol of America. Gangs of New York is loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book of the same name, a history of the gang wars that ravaged the largely immigrant slums of the city in the 19th century. It opens with a brutal, astonishing set piece - a massive street fight between the "Dead Rabbits," a gang of Irish immigrants led by "Priest" Vallon (Liam Neeson), and the "Natives," descendants of the original Dutch and English settlers, led by "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). The Natives win, and the Butcher kills the Priest, whose young son vows revenge. Sixteen years later, the son (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) returns incognitio from a state reformatory, calling himself "Amsterdam" and insinuating himself into the good graces of the Butcher so as to carry out an act of public retribution.

Scorsese has made films on many different scales - from the small personal drama all the way up to the epic. In terms of narrative scope and production values, this is probably his grandest effort yet. Shot entirely at a studio in Italy, the picture boasts a recreation of downtown Manhattan in the 1860s that boggles the mind with its size and audacity. The vision of grinding poverty, crime, and corruption that it presents is unrelentingly grim. And Scorsese uses the gang warfare story to illuminate the underside of American history, the kind you don't read about in textbooks, where power brokers (Jim Broadbent doing fine work as Boss Tweed) make deals with criminals in order to maintain political control, and where the influx of immigrants from Ireland becomes fodder for a Civil War draft that the rich are able to buy themselves out of.

Anti-immigrant hatred, urban violence, democracy subverted by plutocracy - these are not, the film shows, new developments. Continuing his lifelong fascination with violence as the key to power, Scorsese's portrait of our time shows these familiar problems in their most elemental forms. The chaos that is eventually unleashed cuts both ways - the masses whose sufferings are depicted so harshly turn their rage upon helpless blacks as well as the rich, in the recreation of the 1863 draft riots which brings the film's narrative, political, and mythic strands together.

Day-Lewis dominates the screen in the role of Bill the Butcher. In a film of such size, a spectacle where everything is bigger than life, he is a wise enough actor to know that his performance must follow suit. There's something of the ham in his work here, an outlandish theatricality, but it's so integral to the character, and such a clever use of charisma as an expression of evil, that it becomes completely believable and compelling. I use the word "evil," but Scorsese's conception of evil has never been simplistic. Day-Lewis creates a man with a past, an environment, and a world view. Combined with personal power, the character becomes so seductive (even though repellent) that you can understand why Amsterdam is in danger of faltering in his resolve.

The script (Jay Cocks, with later help from Steve Zaillan and Ken Lonergan) follows the production design in its fidelity to the period. It's tough and stirring, and respects the audience's intelligence by not overexplaining things. The picture's major flaw is the love story between Amsterdam and a pickpocket played by Cameron Diaz. I assume that Diaz is in the movie because she's popular and sells tickets, but she's in over her head here, and fails to make the love between her and the young Irish street fighter convincing. To be fair, though, the screenplay doesn't help either her or DiCaprio in this regard. It seems obvious that the love angle is in the film because Scorsese and company thought the movie needed that kind of a draw, but that's not enough of a reason to make it work - the treatment is unenthusiastic, so naturally the viewer is too.

A bigger mistake, I think, was the casting of DiCaprio in the central role. This is the kind of thing that happens when someone becomes a big star - he gets cast in parts because of his stardom, regardless of whether the role is suitable. Amsterdam needed to be played by an actor of greater passion, who is able to project some danger and to embody contradictions of loyalty and revenge, idealism and expediency. DiCaprio doesn't cut it, and Day-Lewis ends up acting rings around him.

With a lesser artist, these flaws would have sunk the movie. But Scorsese knows how to get the best out of what he's got, and his dramatic rhythm and visual style are as bold and confident as ever. In a way, it's an old-fashioned film, the kind Hollywood used to make, where all the resources available to a studio come together to create a world that, in its artificial glory, seems more real than life. But Gangs of New York is at the same time quite different, because of its mournful vision of history, its depiction of violence as the basis of power, and its reflection of our own troubled times rising over the forgotten bones of the dispossessed.

Seemingly at the opposite end of the spectrum from Scorsese, but demonstrating a similar artistic integrity in its approach to an historical subject, Eric Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke is one of the most beautiful movies of the year, and conceptually fascinating as well. Based on the memoirs of an English artistocrat who lived in Paris during the French revolution, the picture succeeds in creating a cinematic equivalent to 18th century visual style. All the exteriors are done with digital matte paintings. There's no attempt to disguise the fact that they are paintings, yet the characters are integrated seamlessly into the fabric.

Naturally, this method has attracted attention - but I find some of the whining by critics (it's unrealistic, distracting, etc.) unintelligible. Rohmer doesn't use this technique for its own sake, or because he's lazy, but in the service of a particular effect. The static nature of the backgrounds serves a basic stillness, a quality of life that is characteristic of the world that is being portrayed. It works splendidly - The Lady and the Duke doesn't feel like a labored dramatization of long-ago events (the so-called "costume drama") but like a film might appear if it were possible to make films in the 1790s.

The story concerns the Englishwoman and confirmed royalist Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), and her friendship with the Duke of Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), one of the most prominent supporters of the Revolution among the artistocracy. When the political situation worsens, the lady discovers that she is barred from leaving the country. At one point she braves personal danger in order to hide a man who is being sought by the authorities. The meetings and conversations between the lady and the Duke, reflecting great fluctuations in their friendship depending on his political decisions, are the movie's backbone. Rohmer takes his time developing the scenes. The pacing and the gentle, unobtrusive camerawork are faithful to the idea of evoking the period in more than material detail, but in mood and sensibility.

Contrary to criticisms I had read prior to viewing, written apparently by those conditioned to expect fast cutting and whirlwind action in everything they see, The Lady and the Duke is an engaging and suspenseful film. Rohmer's art in his later years, which I've come to prefer greatly over his youthful work, is modest to a fault. Style and content are inseparable; nothing is extraneous or inserted for mere show. The historical point of view is that of the source - an aristocrat horrified by the Revolution and its excesses. That this is a partial version of that event, even a distorted one, is hard to deny. But the film avoids the kind of special pleading one expects from a film driven by ideology - after all, the Duke does get to speak for the progressive point of view. That the Revolution threatens to devour him is in itself a criticism, but it's also historical fact. Dreyfus is marvelously fussy in the role. Russell is even better, creating sympathy and admiration for her character, and avoiding the kind of caricature that often tempts actors who play nobility.

The career of the 82-year-old Rohmer continues to amaze. To be able to brilliantly integrate new technology into one's methods as he has done - making it do things that serve the artistic intent rather than work against it - is not a common trait for an older director. His conception of history, insofar as he focuses on matters of personal ethics, taste, and the more private emotions, is essentially conservative. The film lacks a broader historical understanding of the Revolution, or any acknowledgment of the suffering that led to it. But if by conservative we understand the commitment to conserving that which is worthwhile, there is a great deal of value in this perspective.

Rohmer's film is not backward-looking. The larger point of The Lady and the Duke, its reason for being, if you will, is that the past's connection to the present is made tangible in a work of art precisely by being faithful to the style or texture of the past, thereby making it seem "present" to us. The paradox is that the film would seem much less vivid if it had been shot on location instead of using digital backgrounds. The very artificiality of style, through its recognition by a discerning viewer, serves a greater reality in one's perception. Despite a wide disparity in point of view, Rohmer and Scorsese are alike in understanding this.

After Trent Lott got in trouble for envisioning the second half of 20th century American history improved by the election of a segregationist President, I couldn't help thinking of Far From Heaven. As a coded response to the present through the means of the past, nothing this year fits the bill as much as Todd Haynes' film. Welcome to our country as Trent Lott and his friends would have it - but try not to pay attention to the closeted, self-hating gay husband, or the nice black gardener who doesn't seem to know his place.

Of course this is a refraction of 50s style, not the actual 50s. Dennis Quaid's character is the familiar portrayal of doomed homosexuality in older Hollywood (as highlighted in The Celluloid Closet). Dennis Haysbert's character is the Stanley Kramer fantasy that white America kept trying to believe in. The point is, the genie's out of the bottle, and no amount of right-wing fundamentalist hoodoo will ever bring it back. No more gentle Negroes nicely asking for a seat at the lunch counter. And no more aversion treatments to cure gay husbands of their "disease" (at least outside of pseudo-Christian wacko circles). No, there's no going back. But we, or some of us, seem to be trying to.

Haynes used a very specific film style from the 1950s to show where we are - mentally and emotionally - in relation to those times. Another symptom of the Age of Amnesia, however, is that history is not seen as an imaginative reality, but as the dissolving material of linear time, with no connection to us, no meaning. Someone who calls himself a critic complained that Far From Heaven only proves that people in the 1950s were racist and homophobic, and so what? It's as if "people in the 50s" were on another planet, and there were no lines of inheritance between us. This has become more and more the prevailing attitude towards history. Of course it goes along with philistinism in the arts. But it's also a recipe for tyranny. If we all just stay passive and don't make any connections to last year (let alone a decade or a century ago) then those who wish to destroy liberty, who wrap themselves in the mantle of patriotism, people like Lott and John Ashcroft and the rest of the loonies who are dominating public life, get just what they want.

The creation of an atmosphere of fear and hatred toward foreigners and immigrants, labeling dissent as traitorous, destroying the Bill of Rights in the name of freedom, national security as the excuse for unchecked power. Yeah, I'm talking about the 1950s. And it seems as if the only way to really talk about the present, without "scaring" audiences way, the only way to get under the radar, is through films set in the past, or even films that seem as if they were made in the past. Such as: the 1950s. Such as: Far From Heaven.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
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