Study Questions: Week Fourteen

Lost Worlds and Ages of Innocence

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Although set a century earlier than most of the director's films The Age of Innocence embodies subjects and themes central to Scorsese's work. Like Edith Wharton's novel on which it is based, The Age of Innocence is set in the twilight years of New York's social elite, whose traditions had their roots in the pre-Civil War era. The film may be far removed socially from the mean streets of New York's Little Italy, but it dramatizes the director's same concerns with tight knit social groups whose codes and rituals manage to create as well as restrain the individuality of their members. Finally, like Casino, the focus is on characters and events which are about to slip into history. Casino not only commiserates with its hero, but is to a world which came an end in the 1970s.

The Age of Innocence: Where is that Place? Have you Ever Been There?

1. Let's begin by considering the meaning of the title? Is it to be read with or without irony? Was the "Old New York" presented in the film (and in Edith Wharton's novel) an "age of innocence"? What is the meaning of the term as it applies to the society depicted? Just who among the characters are innocent? How is the credits sequence with the unfolding rose related to the title? This question needs to be asked repeatedly as the narrative develops. And we must consider different types of "innocence."

2. What is the significance of the opening scene at the opera? How does it serve to introduce the characters? How does the story being sung foreshadow the action of the film? How does the highly stylized scenery of the opera and the very mannered acting reflect the ritualized lives of the audience?

3. How are the long tracking shots and the close-up shots of significant details thematically allied to the watchers in the theater? What attracts their attention to Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis) while he is in the Welland box?

4. As Newland enters the Beaufort house, the camera follows him, moves to details of the decor (especially the paintings), picks him up again, and then moves to include and introduce most of the major characters. How do these camera movements prepare viewers for the events to come? Why does Scorsese make them resemble the camera work used by Orson Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)?

5. Similar tracking shots capture the decor and the masses of paintings in all the homes. Can you see a connection between the paintings and the characters who inhabit them? For example, why is Mrs. Mingot's walls covered with paintings of dogs 19th-century genre paintings and works of the Hudson River school (Thomas Cole, et. al.) Why are the Van Der Luyden's displaying 18th-century portraits? Finally, why is Ellen Olenska is identified with the impressionists (Mary Cassatt and Georges Seurat)?

6. The narrator (Joanne Woodward) is very much inside the society she describes, but Scorsese's camera takes in the surfaces, the formal behavior of the characters, the social rituals. How does this keep the audience at a distance, make viewers see from the outside?

5. Newland Archer believes himself more detached and sophisticated than other members of his society. Is he really? How do his conversations concerning Ellen with Jack Sillerton at his mother's dinner party and with the lawyer in charge of his firm indications that he may not understand the "arbitrary signs" used to communicate issues never discussed or even recognized as existing? As Ellen will later comment, people always "ask you to pretend." How does the archery contest link May (Winnona Ryder) with the goddess Diana and serve as a sign pointing at a strength of character unrecognized by Newland and revealed in the film's conclusion?

6. Beaufort is described as a scoundrel in matters of money and sex, but does his presence and his wit make him seem villainous or refreshingly energetic? Why? Why not?

7. The film seems to present Newland as the strong defender of the weak and vulnerable Ellen. To what degree is exactly the opposite true? It is a commonplace to describe Newland's world as patriarchal, male dominated. But can a society in which matriarchs decide on proper marriages, how money is to be spent, and are arbiters of taste be said to be patriarchal? Why? Why not?

8. Edith Wharton's novel seems to have little in common with Scorsese's Little Italy, but there are many similarities. In what ways, for instance are the dilemmas faced by Newland and Charlie in Mean Streets similar? How do the different worlds they live in force them to resolve their dilemmas in antithetical ways? How do the "tribes" making up New York's upper class resemble the families in Mean Streets or Goodfellas? Which is better able to socialize their young men and women? Why? Does Scorsese's film look at the earlier world with a certain nostalgia? What in style, theme, or story makes you think so?

9. How, exactly, is Ellen persuaded to return to Europe? Why does she refuse to run off with Newland? What does she know about the "place" where romantic love will be sufficient?

10. What is the significance of the narrative's coda in which Newland sees his life pass and makes a final trip to Paris? Does it ask viewers to honor Newland's choices, or does it make him seem tamed and passive? Or some of both leaving a familiar Scorsese ambiguity in the ending. Explain your judgment.