Have A Very Leo Noel

By Richard Corliss; Leonardo DiCaprio; Richard Schickel

THE GANGS OF NEW YORK STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Liam Neeson DIRECTED BY: Martin Scorsese

Maybe nobody told Martin Scorsese the American film epic was a dead form. Or maybe Scorsese was too stubborn to give up a project he had nurtured since 1970, when the epic was still the genre du jour and, on Belfast's mean streets, Protestants and Catholics were spilling one another's blood in a replay of the New York City Irish-Anglo gang wars of the 1860s, which Scorsese was itching to dramatize. Then Star Wars changed the landscape of the epic from our own martial planet to a galaxy far, far away. Today when audiences go into the past, they want fantasy. They're not looking to pay for history lessons.

Thus Gangs--with so many detours in its making, and abraded by Scorsese's well-publicized struggle with Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films--may be the epic's last gasp. If so, it is a gasp that sings, howls, like a grand tenor at an Irish wake. Set in the gaudy, pestilential Five Points section of lower Manhattan, Gangs begins with an 1846 street fight: Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis ) and his Nativists against Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) and his horde of Hibernians. It ends in 1863 with another rumble--Bill now battling Priest's vengeful son Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio)--as the city explodes in riots that escalate from a protest against Civil War conscription to a four-day massacre. In between are violent scenes played out with a ferocity as erotic as it is deranged; murder and mutilation, when performed by men who have been close, are acts more intimate than sex.

There's a triangular conflict--an evil man, the rival he has treated like a son and the woman (Cameron Diaz) they both have loved and used--with three stars at the top of their form. DiCaprio's winsomeness has matured into a wily assurance that doesn't rely on bravado. Diaz, stifling the giggles, displays a grave, bruised beauty. Day-Lewis struts with the insane intensity and twisted grin of early Robert De Niro; the Butcher loves the monster he has become.

For most of its galloping 2-hr. 45-min. span, Gangs confidently enlarges this triangle to include the sweeping vision of a New York suddenly swarming with immigrants. Displaying an urgency and elegance unmatched by any other living auteur, Scorsese finds drama in visual contrast: a door in a dark, noisy room that is kicked open to reveal a silent, snow-laden street. One amazing panorama shows men coming off a ship from Ireland, being immediately conscripted and outfitted in Northern blue, then put on a troop ship--all in a single shot that ends with a view of the troop ship's cargo: 20 coffins on the dock.

As the newcomers gain political power through their numbers, the question isn't whether an Irishman can be elected to city office but whether he can survive his victory. Ruthless toughs mingle with 1860s gentry in a colossal mix of Scorsese's Mean Streets and The Age of Innocence. Gangs is the director's proclamation that all his movies about belligerent young men are modern-dress versions of a crucial melodrama that shaped urban America. Gangs is the prototype for every one of Scorsese's films; it just happens to come after them.

At the film's climax, the Draft Riots engulf the city as Bill and Amsterdam line up for their final face-off--a Celtic clan skirmish that has little to do with the larger atrocities. The point may be that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of corpses when anarchy breaks loose. This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement. --By Richard Corliss

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen DIRECTED BY: Steven Spielberg

One staple of our popular culture, comedy division, is the Road Runner--Wile E. Coyote duel, in which the cheerful little beeper continually eludes the inept but monomaniacal chasings of the pursuing varmint. Another less often noted but more sober pop-cultural theme is Steven Spielberg's obsession with children (E.T., Empire of the Sun, et al.) who as a result of either death or divorce are bereft of conventional parenting and wonder if they can successfully make it to maturity. It is the business of Catch Me If You Can to meld these two subgenres in a single film and see what happens--which turns out to be very amusing.

The movie follows the autobiography of Frank W. Abagnale Jr., a reformed con man. His parents separated when he was 14. Asked to choose one or the other to live with, he couldn't make the choice, so he skipped town for New York City. Looking older than his years, he acquired a pilot's uniform and a forged ID. He was soon afforded many boons--free trips around the country, girls (who flocked to this really cute guy in his fly-boy suit) and, best of all, the ability to cash fraudulent checks largely on the basis of his assured and glamorous presence. Before Abagnale's career ended five years later--the movie compresses the time frame--he had also passed himself off as a doctor and lawyer and acquired $2.5 million in ill-gotten gains and the avid attention of the FBI, which caught and imprisoned him.

Here the film, written with unforced ease by Jeff Nathanson and directed in the same graceful spirit by Spielberg, makes its largest fictional leap; it conflates several FBI pursuers into one. But that's more than all right, because Carl Hanratty is wonderfully played by Tom Hanks. He wears half-horn-rims and a dorky little hat, speaks in a grating Boston accent and tends to spend his Christmas Eves at the office eating Chinese takeout and obsessing about Abagnale. It's a delicious comic portrayal, though not more so than Leonardo DiCaprio's charming impersonation of Abagnale, which is simultaneously naive and knowing. Abagnale's life is shadowed by his failed father (played with melancholic anger by a superb Christopher Walken), who had the spirit of a con artist but none of the breed's subtle skills.

There is a happy ending, which would be imprudent to reveal. Suffice it to say Abagnale was a smart cookie, with the wit to see that his talents might have value in the straight world and the late-blooming moral intelligence not to take too much pride in his boyish exploits. As years passed, he married, had kids, prospered and recognized that what he had done in his youth was not very nice, to say the least. Abagnale's story, combined with Nathanson's sensitivity to his family situation and Spielberg's interest in lost boys who manage to find their best selves, results in about the nicest movie you could ask for at the holidays: a gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices. --By Richard Schickel