Cameron Diaz – Movie Musings

Scorsese’s epic missed-opportunity, a film full of merits but overall unsatisfying

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon), Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane), Liam Neeson (“Preist” Vallon), Jim Broadbent (William “Boss” Tweed), John C Reilly (“Happy” Jack Mulraney), Henry Thomas (Johnny Sirocco), Brendan Gleeson (Walter “Monk” McGinn), Gary Lewis (McGloin), Stephen Graham (Shang), Eddie Marsan (Killoran), Alec McCowen (Reverend Raleigh), David Hemmings (John F Schermerhorn), Lawrence Gilliard Jnr (Jimmy Spoils)

Gangs of New York: the film Scorsese always dreamed of making. I wonder if it’s now the film he dreams most about getting another go at? It needed serious money to make it, from the pockets of Harvey Weinstein (oh dear God). It’s well-known that Weinstein – then infamous as ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ before far more revolting revelations – and Scorsese fought throughout (so much so Scorsese considered quitting cinema). Scorsese has always claimed the unevenly paced final film is his ‘director’s cut’ – but considering his more recent films with even-more-bottomless-pocket backing (Netflix and Apple) were nearly four hours a piece, that’s increasingly hard to believe.

Set mostly during the horror of the American Civil War, Gangs of New York bites off an awful lot. A depiction of an entire era of American culture, exploration of migration and race in America, corruption in New York politics, gang warfare on the streets of Victorian New York, a son looking for revenge… Gangs of New York tries to cover it all and with very mixed success. Irish migrant Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo Di Caprio) grows up an orphan after his gang boss father ‘Priest’ (Liam Neeson) is killed by nativist gang leader Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). He returns to New York, bent on revenge, working his way into Bill’s confidence, while Civil War tensions bubble and burn in New York.

There genuinely is a lot to enjoy in Gangs of New York. Not least the huge scale of it. Dante Ferretti went to town recreating the slums of nineteenth century New York, chucking in the sort of details which reflect what must have been hours scrutinising historical records. Unlike other Scorsese films, Gangs drips in colour, with the various street groups showing off their panache with colourful, distinctive clothing – just as the posh knobs of uptown New York flaunt their wealth in their threads. This all gives a huge amount of scope for Scorsese’s superb camerawork, very lusciously shot and with sequences cut to perfection by Thelma Schoonmaker (Howard Shore’s score is also good, although you can tell listening to it, he was still immersed in Middle Earth).

And of course, when the story is boiled down to it’s the principles it is most engaged in, it is a decent story of a son revenging a father by taking out a man he almost begins to see as a surrogate father. The casting of Liam Neeson as Amsterdam’s lost pop is a masterstroke. Neeson’s charismatic presence easily convinces an audience that of course characters would still be talking about him decades later and even his enemies would dream of becoming him. Gangs tries to wrap its fingers around a Homeric plot: new boss Bill is consumed with boredom at his mastery of the world and wants a challenge, so almost deliberately restarts the earlier cycle, casting DiCaprio’s Amsterdam as a younger version of himself (with himself as Neeson’s Priest). In turn, as is often the case with Scorsese, we’re left in tenterhooks to see if Amsterdam is savvy enough to get out of a life of crime or if he will double down.

This plot is also the most engaging as it revolves around Daniel Day-Lewis’ larger-than-life Bill the Butcher. Plucked from a supposed retirement (in the years leading up to this, urban rumour had it Day-Lewis worked as cobbler somewhere in Italy), Day-Lewis rips into Gangs with the sort of towering commitment that saw him tapping a glass contact lens on his eye with a knife dozens of times a day so he could do it without flinching on camera. But Day-Lewis doesn’t just chew the scenery. He makes Bill as poetic and reflective as he is impulsively violent. His triumphs give him only passing pleasure and he feels like a relic clinging to a dying past. Day-Lewis has a knock-out, early-morning monologue (draped in an American flag) which he gives just the right spin of vulnerable regret and desire for an equal, even while talking about the unrelenting violence of his rise and the fear it’s based on. He’s the primary reason to continue watching the film.

Because aside from that, you are picking out only scenes and performances that survived the ruthless cutting down to the two-and-a-half hours we have. Day-Lewis gets more than his fair share, and there are fine performances from Brendan Gleeson as a principled club-for-hire, Jim Broadbent as a jovially corrupt politician and John C Reilly as a sleazily sadistic policeman. The film’s opening, a pitched street-battle, is shot and directed with real gusto, as are later scenes of New York Draft riots. Dynamic filming ideas abound, like a striking scene that tracks in one-shot Irish immigrants arriving, being pelted with stones, signing up for the army and boarding a ship out of New York to almost certain death on the front lines. But it’s only flashes of brilliance.

The overwhelming feeling otherwise is how fast everything is going and how half-formed plot ideas feel. Characters who were surely once more important in a longer cut, linger on the edges of scenes (or are billed prominently without even having names). The film relies so much on the vast background and research in its making that many of its scenes require DiCaprio to frequently limber up for an intermittent voiceover to force-feed us historical context on everything from the Five Points to pick-pocketing to the passing of the Draft Act. Several scenes – often involving Broadbent – feel like bullet points of longer, denser conversations rammed with historical details.

The vast amount of stuff the film tries to cover in its non-epic running time leaves so much feeling under explored or box-ticked. I can imagine a cut where more time given over to nativist fury at Lincoln’s slavery emancipation would have led to a more complex plot for Lawrence Gilliard Jnr’s Jimmy (the only Black character in the film), instead of him being treated as just one of a crowd until he’s unceremoniously lynched in a riot. Or the hypocritical church, which drives out the poor from their only refuge to build a church to tend to them, would have been seen as real antagonists. Or the wealthy, preening themselves during sight-seeing tours to the Five Points, may have been used to explore the class tensions in a country where the poor were being shipped to the Civil War front lines to die. All of these ideas, and more, get their five minutes in the sun but leave little real impact.

It also doesn’t help that both DiCaprio and Diaz feel out of the depth. Perhaps this role, and the chance to work with Scorsese, was something DiCaprio didn’t feel ready for. He finds little of interest or life in Amsterdam, who feels moody and sullen rather than a conflicted angel of revenge. He’s also struggling with the accent; but not as much as Diaz, fighting a losing battle with her Irish lilt. Diaz never really convinces as a working-class pickpocket (she feels far too modern and middle class). She also has the most cliched role as (essentially) a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, pushing her man to leave revenge behind. Both actors, you feel, were part of Weinsteins box-office plan (Weinstein also vetoed any physical consequences for the ferocious beating Amsterdam takes at the halfway point – within ten minutes of screentime he looks no worse than he would sleeping off a big night).

Gangs of New York feels like a sort of Spark Notes version of a much-longer, more-complex, multi-faceted film on race, class, gender and immigration in Civil War New York. All that stuff is in there but skirted over so fast with such little depth you can very easily watch the film a couple of times and not spot it at all. Which I suppose makes it a tragedy of sorts, a real could-have-been. Its noticeable that, twenty years later, no-one seems inclined to look back at Gangs of New York and re-evaluate it as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece. Instead, it feels like the film as forgotten now as it was at the Oscars with its eleven nominations and zero wins.

A portal into the head of a famous actor? What better way to find out what it’s like Being John Malkovich

Director: Spike Jonze

Cast: John Cusack (Craig Schwartz), Cameron Diaz (Lotte Schwartz), Catherine Keener (Maxine Lund), John Malkovich (John Horatio Malkovich), Orson Bean (Dr Lester), Mary Kay Place (Floris), Charlie Sheen (Himself), W Earl Brown (JM Inc Customer)

Is there a more consciously eccentric film ever made than Being John Malkovich? Can you imagine the pitch to the Hollywood suits?

Our hero, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is a weedy, bitter puppeteer (as well as creep and potential stalker), whose wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) fills their house with rescue animals, from talkative parrots to a chimp with PTSD. Needing to make ends meet, Schwartz takes a filing job at a company based on floor 7½ of an office block (it’s a low ceilinged floor built between the other two floors – it’s cheaper on the rent obviously) where he becomes obsessed with his sexy co-worker Maxine Lund (Catherine Keener), who is resolutely not interested. But all this changes one day when Schwartz finds a fleshy, dark tunnel behind a filming cabinet that takes someone into the mind of actor John Malkovich (John Malkovich) – for 15 minutes, before expelling you onto the New Jersey turnpike. Sounds like a business interest for Schwartz and Maxine (spend 15 minutes in someone else’s body!), but the experience of being in someone’s body slowly begins to change Schwartz, Lotte and Maxine – and having his brain invaded has a terrible impact on Malkovich himself.

If that’s not the oddest plot you’ve ever heard, then I don’t know what films you’ve been watching. The film was the brainchild of Charlie Kaufman, who developed from this into one of the most distinctively gifted screenwriters in Hollywood, a master of the quirky and weird, the off-the-wall and the science fiction tinged everyday fantasy, blessed with the ability to mix in genuine human emotion amongst the oddness.

Being John Malkovich is an inspired idea and Kaufman’s script is ingenious in its structure and progression. Never once does the film settle for the expected narrative development or the conventional structure. It’s a livewire of a film that constantly leaves you guessing, switching tone and throwing logical but unexpected plot twists at every turn. There are plenty of moments where you could expect events to take a conventional turn, but the film never settles for the obvious.

Kaufman’s inspired script was lucky enough to find a quirky visual stylist who was willing to embrace it as much as Spike Jonze did. Jonze’s direction is a masterclass in small detail, slight twists and little touches of invention that never draw excessive attention to themselves but combine to make a thrillingly off-the-wall final picture.

Jonze knows that the jokes and surrealism of Kaufman’s script are so effective that they don’t need a firm directorial hand to lean the humour on – they work absolutely fine presented almost as written, and make for terrific entertainment. He shoots the low ceiling of floor 7½ with such straightforward confidence that each scene becomes hilarious for its stooped actors and crammed rooms. Jonze can therefore concentrate the flourishes on core moments, from the puppetry that Schwartz and later a Schwartz-controlled Malkovich make their life’s work, to assorted training and educational videos that pepper the film at key moments.

Like Kaufman as well, Jonze’s storytelling works because he inherently understands human emotion and isn’t afraid to throw it into the film alongside the humour. Plenty of directors would have been happy to have all the principals settle into being comic stereotypes, or overplayed pantomime figures. Jonze encouraged the actors to find the depth – and sometimes the darkness – in their characters, to ground the film effectively with touches of real life tragedy and human flaws that give weight to the surreal sci-fi elements – so much so that they start to feel as real as the rest.

John Cusack’s Schwartz is a bitter, increasingly twisted fantasist and dreamer – the sort of guy who believes that his lack of willingness to compromise his art in any way is a strength (his puppetry shows are highly complex, sexualised, high-blown, poetry-inspired hilarious puffs of pretension). Schwartz could have become a joke or a guy with a big dream – but the film increasingly shows him to be a dark, obsessive, cruel even dangerous outsider, who has no problem with harming other people to get what he wants, his moral compass is driven by his self-assessment of himself as a man treated badly by others, so doing what he wants is somehow deserved. It’s an increasingly dark portrait of a man who has more than hint of danger to him.

Keener, as the focus of his obsession, also does extraordinary work as a woman the film is not afraid to present as unpleasant in her selfishness, casual cruelty and greed – but a woman who slowly allows herself to open up and reveal an emotional openness and romanticism someone watching the start of the film would never expect. Similarly Diaz’s downtrodden, sad wife at home flourishes and grows as a person, as she finds in herself a new comfort and ease with who she is, from inhabiting the mind of another person. Both are excellent.

The film explores fascinating ideas of identity – Lotte and Maxine find a freedom and an exciting otherness in being a passenger in another person’s body, and use it as voyages of self discovery for themselves. Schwartz on the other hand sees this body – just as he sees all human beings – as just another puppet for him to control, another way of adjusting the world to match his requirements, rather than change anything about himself. While some lose themselves in Malkovich’s body and find the experience rewarding, Schwartz can only find happiness when bending the body to his own will.

And what of Malkovich himself? Well has there ever been a braver performance in film? Malkovich is superb as an arch portrait of himself as a rather self-important actor, with an unknowable coolness about him, an intellectualism that makes him a man easy to respect but strangely hard to relate to, a face that is distinctive but a strangely unrelatable style that makes him hard to remember (it’s really an extraordinarily funny and brave performance). As Malkovich realises what is happening to him, the film plays with real beats of tragedy and even horror – what would it be like to be forced into being a passenger in your own head? This is nothing compared to the horror Malkovich encounters when he enters the tunnel himself – to find himself in a world where everyone looks like Malkovich and can only speak using the word “Malkovich”.

Being John Malkovich uses its surreal ideas to explore profound – and even chilling – ideas of control, destiny, personality and identity. With several superb performances, a brilliant script and controlled and intelligent direction, it’s a film unlike any other – and continues to delight and surprise twenty years on from its release.