gangs of new york

In the commentary for Gangs of New York, the director - Martin Scorsese - describes the film as an opera.

What he means by that is it's a heightened reality, as opposed to real reality. In other words, it's exaggerated, amped up to make broader points that hold truth, rather than showing us the truth.

I can see exactly where he's coming from, but I'm not entirely sure if I really liked the end result.

Part of the problem is that the film is very long and quite a few bits of it feel a little unnecessary. They feels like they could easily have been compressed or even removed, and the end product wouldn't really miss them.

Unfortunately, one of the elements that's really the most responsible for this is the romantic thread. The romance feels the least well developed - and the least necessary - thread of the story.

The problem there is that without it this would be a rather woman free zone, which from a traditional point of view is a risky road to tread. Films can work without romance, but it's often cynically observed that it helps with the female box office to have a romantic element.

And I guess that's my real problem with it - it does feel like a bit of an odd on to try to please that demographic, rather than something that's fundamental to the story. I mean, it's woven in in such a way that key plot elements result, but to be frank you could quite easily have achieved them in other ways.

Anyway, the thing that does work is the thing that Scorsese mainly intended - the film works as a sort of large, overblown allegory to convey things like the breakdown of society, honour, bigotry, oppression and man's inhumanity to man. Sometimes it does this with almost comic book violence, other times with genuine humour.

But it does this with an interestingly subtle and clever touch. For example, just about everyone in the film has moments of real unpleasantness, but equally they mostly have really touching moments. In other words, they're surprisingly complex characters given the overblown, stylistic nature of the film in general.

And yet sometimes it can feel a little like pastiche. So, for example, this part of New York is portrayed as almost being on the verge of descending into total lawless-anarchy, and yet at the same time you've got upper-class people wandering about the streets. If it was that dangerous and anarchic, they'd avoid the place wouldn't they?

So yeah, I have rather mixed feelings if I'm honest - on some levels the film works very well, but on others it doesn't work so well, especially given its long running length.