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William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting is my most beloved
character in film history. It's not like I've seen every movie ever made
or anything, but I have seen a lot, and loved a lot of movie characters,
and from his first stovepipe-hatted moment in Gangs of New York,
Bill displaced Peter Gibbons (Office Space), Trent Walker (Swingers),
Richie Tenenbaum (The Royal Tenenbaums), and Eric Cartman (South
Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut).
I looooove Bill the Butcher. You have to put aside the whole
thing where he's a homicidal sociopath in order to appreciate his cruel
wit and charisma -- but of course, that's kind of the point of the movie:
Bill, the despicable sadist, manages to win over the audience the same
way he wins over the even more reluctant Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo
DiCaprio), the orphaned vigilante who's sworn to kill Bill
in order to avenge his father's death. At first, Amsterdam worms his way
into Bill's posse in order to get close enough to him to (eventually)
kill him. And, ultimately, his mission is successful and he goes through
with his plan. But the middle stretch of the movie shows us an Amsterdam
struggling with his ambivalent feelings toward Bill. The Butcher comes to
love Amsterdam like a son -- installing him high up in his gang, crowing
over Amsterdam's entrepreneurial criminal spirit -- and Amsterdam seems
to have fun with The Butcher and even saves his life from a would-be
assassin. (While everything about Cameron
Diaz's Jenny Everdeane is utterly extraneous to the
forward motion of the plot, one might argue that the reason she exists is
to polarize her sometime lovers, Bill and Amsterdam, against each other,
each thinking that she isn't worthy of the other -- or to stand as a
surrogate for Bill and Amsterdam's unconsummated love for each other.)
Much of the credit for the deep impression Bill leaves on the audience
is due to Jay Cocks, Kenneth Lonergan, and Steven Zaillian, who wrote Gangs
of New York's Oscar-nominated screenplay. But there isn't another
actor working today who could have done the job Daniel Day-Lewis did with
a role that is, on paper, so unsympathetic, and yet is the linchpin of
the whole film. His phenomenal performance poses a challenge to every other
actor in the production, and few of them are up to the task -- certainly
not the feeble Diaz; not DiCaprio, who is certainly more convincing as a
1960s con man (in Catch Me If You Can) than an 1860s thug; not
even the generally excellent John C. Reilly. Apart from Liam Neeson, Jim
Broadbent, and Brendan Gleeson, none of the principal cast members is
credible opposite Day-Lewis. He makes the enormous sequence of choices
that compose his performance as Bill look so effortless that the other
actors, concentrating on their poor Irish accents or complicated
undergarments, really show the strain of all the ack-ting they're
doing. (Particularly Diaz. She's really just so terrible and it can't be
said enough.)
I have seen a goodly portion of Day-Lewis's twenty-one movies, and I
have never seen him play the same role twice. (One cannot say the same of
his fellow Best Actor nominee, Jack Nicholson -- who is heavily favoured
to win the award this year.) Recently, I watched Day-Lewis again in A
Room With a View, in which he plays Cecil Vyse. Cecil is the Merchant
Ivory version of Obstacle Guy -- Helena Bonham Carter's Lucy Honeychurch
gets engaged to him because she's confused and upset by her actual
feelings of love for Julian Sands's George Emerson. (If I may digress for
a moment: I first read the novel on which the movie is based several
years after the movie was released. I knew who was in the cast of the
movie, but I mistakenly swapped Sands's and Day-Lewis's roles in my mind,
and I submit that Day-Lewis would have been just as good as the taciturn,
intense George, who is positively transformed by his love for Lucy. It
could have been like that production of True West where John C.
Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman traded roles each night: only really
great actors can take on a challenge like that.) Anyway, if the brutal,
carnal maniac Bill the Butcher is at one end of the spectrum, Cecil is at
the other: he's a prissy, effete, insufferable snob who is plainly wrong
for Lucy. None of the people in his circle is up to his high standards
(including his fiancιe), and the only activity that appears to give him
anything resembling pleasure is making fun of badly written books. Say
what you will about Bill the Butcher -- that he's a power-mad xenophobe,
blah blah blah -- but at least he isn't an anhedonic prat like Cecil.
There's a world of difference between the characters of Bill and Cecil,
and Day-Lewis is no less convincing in one role than the other.
In the years between Room and Gangs, Day-Lewis showed
off his range in roles as diverse as disabled writer Christy Brown in My
Left Foot (for which he won his first Oscar) and classed-up sexaholic
Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being; lovelorn lawyer
Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, and falsely accused IRA terrorist
in In the Name of the Father (for which he received his second
Oscar nomination). He hasn't taken as many jobs as some other actors of
his generation -- unlike fellow nominee Nicolas Cage, he isn't a common
feature in terrible action movies, choosing instead to concentrate on
films that don't suck donkey cock. I mean, the next time you find
yourself defending Nicolas Cage's career and talent, stop for a second
and try to picture Daniel Day-Lewis in a prison jumpsuit and hair
extensions in Con Air, and I think you will find that defense hard
to sustain. There are actors, and there are hacks. Nicolas Cage stopped
being an actor a long time ago.
It's not mandatory for an actor to prove his commitment to his craft
by withdrawing from the public and promotional jobs that are collateral
to Hollywood filmmaking, but it helps -- at least as far as we're
concerned, although in Day-Lewis's case, it makes the question of
calculating his level of fame that much harder. In a celebrity-obsessed
culture (or "culture"), the choice to suspend one's public life
is especially meaningful, and once Gangs finally premiered, much
was made in the press of Day-Lewis's five-year hiatus from films. He has
been frank in interviews about the fact that he could go five more years
without making a film and not miss the process, commenting, "There's
always a general sense of having fallen short. It's just 'is that all it
was? I thought it was bigger than that.' It always seems terribly small
to me, so to be honest, I'm not sure I'd like to do it again. I have no
plans to work on a film any time soon." And: "As much as I love
the work I also love to stay away from it." And: "Nothing
happened over the course of making Gangs of New York that made me
think, 'Why don't I do this more often?'" It's almost as though fame
is immaterial to him; he doesn't do anything to increase his level of
fame (such as appear on numerous talk shows or saturate the market with
his movies), and seems slightly uncomfortable at the level of fame he has
already attained. So, we'd have to say his fame level is just right: he's
famous enough to get offered the best roles, and concerned enough about
not getting too famous that the ones he does rarely play are
spectacular and satisfying events.
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