The Age of Innocence (1993)

Sumptuous and painfully detailed, The Age of Innocence, adapted from the novel by Edith Wharton, seems at first glance an unlikely venture for relentlessly contemporary New Yorker Martin Scorsese. But its loving exploration of the arcane workings of a closed society, that of wealthy, well-bred New Yorkers of the 1870s, has more in common than one might expect with Scorsese's earlier work, from Mean Streets (1973)through Goodfellas (1990), Age of Innocence may look like a Merchant-Ivory film, but it's no Room with a View or Howard's End.

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), a respectable but vaguely discontented young lawyer, is engaged to marry the vapid and eminently proper May Welland (Winona Ryder). Their well-ordered lives are disrupted by the return of May's cousin, Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), a countess by virtue of her marriage to a Polish aristocrat. Intelligent, sophisticated, and just a bit too continental after her years abroad, Ellen is at first shunned by New York society, then barely accepted after the Archers and the Wellands band together to draw her back into the fold. Ellen's decision to divorce her dissolute husband precipitates a social crisis, and Newland is recruited to dissuade her. Perhaps inevitably, they fall in love. Aware that to act on their repressed passion would banish them forever from a rigid, puritanical society that ruthlessly rejects those touched by the faintest hint of scandal, both Ellen and Newland accede to the impossibility of their position. Newland marries May, and Ellen returns to Europe.

In an epilogue set some 20 years later, Newland's grown son persuades him to visit the now aged Ellen, who is living in Paris. Though he gets as far as the pavement below her apartment, he is unable to face her. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Age of Innocence is how alien its underlying assumptions are to a society saturated with "Just Do It!" messages. Beneath the delineation of manners and mannerisms, the examination of lushly appointed decor and clothing, the evocation of a time and a place lost to the forward rush of history, The Age of Innocence rests on a moral struggle all but impossible to imagine in a modern day setting. To be torn between following one's heart and doing what's expected is a common conflict, but it's regularly invoked with the understanding that the heart knows what it wants, and eventually gets it; the only question is how.

That Newland and Ellen actually part, rather than defy convention, is so counter to contemporary thinking as to be almost unbelievable. But Scorsese understands them, recognizes that beneath the skin, Ellen and Newland are the mirror images of the wise guys torn between what they want and responsibility to the Family, the thugs tormented by fealty to the code of the street and their personal relationships.

The film a feast for the eyes, which is both an asset and a liability. The obsessive examination of surfaces--engraved invitations, mirrors and picture frames, food and silverware, richly upholstered furniture and women whose dresses shimmer with glass beads and lace, gloves and massive arrangements of flowers--is a powerful metaphor for the displacement of sexual desire into relentless acquisitiveness. But it runs the risk of being seen merely as meticulous attention to window dressing, and while Scorsese uses breathless camera movement to generate a sense of momentum amidst the suffocating detail, the narrative still drags a bit, burdened by the weight of visual minutiae.

Interestingly, this is not a fault of Wharton's book, which proceeds at a brisk clip. The transition from novel to film, never an easy one, is increasingly difficult in direct proportion to the literary merit of the original. Not necessarily its greatness, which may be a product of theme or storytelling and often can be translated to the screen with relative ease, but its strictly literary properties. The film borders precariously on stifling fidelity to the source material, always a danger when adapting works of the high art of literature into the low entertainment of movies, and risks smothering it in reverence. Wharton is frequently praised as a perceptive analyst of bygone social mores, but this does her the injustice of making her sound dull; she's actually a first class gossip, who can tell a story breathlessly, yet in the richest detail, missing neither a fleeting emotional nuance nor the opportunity to mock an impossible hat. Hers is a precise and distinctive voice. Film critic-turned-screenwriter Jay Cocks' script treats the novel's incidents and dialogue with great care. Where the film falters a bit is in tone; a little waspishness would have gone a long way to preserving Wharton's voice, and the use of disembodied narration to incorporate her observations (read rather flatly by Joanne Woodward) is probably the film's least successful strategy.

Cast:

Performer, Character

Daniel Day-Lewis, Newland Archer

Michelle Pfeiffer, Countess Ellen Olenska

Winona Ryder, May Welland

Alexis Smith, Louisa Van Der Luyden

Geraldine Chaplin, Mrs. Welland

Mary Beth Hurt, Regina Beaufort

Alec McCowen, Sillerton Jackson

Richard E. Grant, Larry Lefferts

Miriam Margolyes, Mrs. Mingott

Robert Sean Leonard, Ted Archer

Sian Phillips, Mrs. Archer

Jonathan Pryce, Riviere

Michael Gough, Henry Van Der Luyden

Joanne Woodward, Narrator

Stuart Wilson, Julius Beaufort

Carolyn Farina, Janey Archer

Domenica Scorsese, Katie Blenker

Production Credits:

Producer, Barbara De Fina

Director, Martin Scorsese

Screenwriters, Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese (based on the novel by Edith Wharton)

Editor, Thelma Schoonmaker

Cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus

Composer, Elmer Bernstein