It’s hard to imagine that America was such a strange and alien place only three quarters of a century before I was born. And yet what I saw in this film doesn’t conflict with information I’ve gotten from other places, e.g. Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War.

It was a time when America seemed in danger of being overrun by immigrants, as usual. In this case, it was the Irish, fleeing British oppression and, later, the potato famine, arriving in New York, and finding themselves in conflict with Native Americans. ⁽¹⁾ In a relatively short but violent preface to this nearly three-hour film, we see a group of Irish newcomers, the “Dead Rabbits”, under the leadership of a rather unusual priest, Father Vallon (Liam Neeson), take on a gang of “native americans” under the leadership of William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). The battle ends with Vallon dead and his young son taken away to be raised in a reform school on Hellgate Island.

Sixteen years later, in the second year of the Civil War, young Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo diCaprio) returns to Manhattan, to avenge his father. New York, particularly the Five Points region, is a horrible place to live, what with rampant extortion, police corruption, and murder; and whatever you do, don’t let your house catch fire — the behavior of the fire departments (plural intended) is worse than that of those in ancient Rome! (In fact, don’t live next to someone whose house is going to catch fire — you’re as likely to be ripped off as they are!)

William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting is still in operation, attempting to keep America pure, and he also provides the muscle for the activities of William Tweed’s (Jim Broadbent’s) Tammany Hall, the Democratic political organization that runs a large part of New York City. (On the other hand, Fernando Wood, who Catton suggests was a genuine power in New York of the time, is never mentioned.) Amsterdam falls in with Cutting and becomes something of an apprentice, a position formerly held by a delightful young pickpocket and daytime burglar (“bludger”) named Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz). Ultimately, Cutting figures out who Amsterdam is, at about the same time that Amsterdam attempts (unsuccessfully) to avenge his father on Cutting; after that, Amsterdam is on his own again, and must work to reform the Irish gangs to take on Cutting, while Cutting himself has to put together a coalition to save America from the foreigners. The eventual conflict is carried out against the backdrop of the Conscription Riots of 1863, a holocaust long forgotten when, in 2001, those reporting on the fall of the World Trade Center insisted that this was the worst thing that had ever happened in New York. (Being bombarded by your own navy’s heavy guns has to be somewhere high up on that list of absolutely awful things that can happen to a city.)

Scorsese, in making this movie, is perhaps trying to tell us something about our history, and how easy it is to forget. The final sequence of skylines backgrounding a decaying and disappearing graveyard emphasize this — and perhaps most obviously, the very final scene of the sequence, which was pretty obviously filmed before September 11, 2001.

I found it worth seeing, perhaps because I knew just a smidgin about the history of the era. But don’t go to this film hoping to find your own historical roots in it; if you’re lucky, you won’t.

⁽¹⁾ Even I can remember when the term “Native American” was used not to refer to the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent but to individuals whose ancestors had arrived here from Europe a generation or so earlier.