Pip: Welcome to Wanderings and … wonderings. — where the ellipsis does a lot of heavy lifting and today, so does one very specific grievance about a Martin Scorsese film.
Mara: Ben Gould takes us deep into a movie that promised everything and delivered something far more complicated — and far more frustrating. Let's start with what went wrong in 1860s New York.
Gangs of New York: A Film That Had No Business Being This Annoying
Pip: The premise here is simple: a movie with every ingredient for greatness — Scorsese, Day-Lewis, New York, crime, religion — somehow managed to squander the lot. The question is how, exactly, and why it still stings decades later.
Mara: The post opens with a confession of anticipation turned sour, and this line captures it precisely: "This is the only Scorsese film in which he appears overwhelmed by the material, which I find completely baffling as it's about New York, crime, and religion, his cinema oeuvre."
Pip: That's the sting of it — this wasn't alien territory for Scorsese. If he loses the thread here, it isn't because the subject defeated him, it's because something in the execution went genuinely sideways.
Mara: The specific complaints stack up fast. The visual style is described as "pointlessly and relentlessly weird," depicting 1860s New York as "something out of a comic book." The editing is jarring — baroque costuming, lurching pacing, a U2 song over the closing shot.
Pip: A U2 song. Over the Twin Towers. In a period film. That's not a closing statement, that's a hostage situation.
Mara: Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio both take hits for their accents, with DiCaprio described as "evidently awed by the full-method Daniel Day-Lewis." And then — perhaps most surprisingly — Day-Lewis himself doesn't escape. His performance is called "just comedy, nothing else."
Pip: Calling Daniel Day-Lewis's work in a Scorsese film the weakest link takes a certain confidence.
Mara: The post lands on a recurring-disappointment metaphor that sums up the whole relationship with the film: "The only parallel I can think of is when you open the fridge expecting a different result from when you opened it 30 minutes prior." It closes, simply, with "Shite."
Pip: Economical. The film spent three hours; the verdict took five letters.
Mara: Strong feelings, clearly held for a long time — there's something almost affectionate in how much this film still irritates.
Pip: That's the thing about movies that almost worked. They haunt you. More wanderings next time.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 