Martin Scorsese’s film of the Edith Wharton novel “The Age of Innocence” is a great, velvety, beautiful anachronism. It’s a movie almost drunk on romance, literature and cinema, a splendid period picture that keeps rashly breaking rules and boundaries.
As you’d expect from Scorsese, it’s no waxworks wannabe classic. It has a pulse, a volatile current. Along with its lustrous, nervy evocation of a vanished realm of money and manners-upper-class 1870s Manhattan-this movie seethes with a quiet, scathing condemnation of what that world really stood for.
Wharton’s story is witheringly poignant: a tale of “good families,” of desire harried by strict codes and refinements. Like the affair in David Lean’s “Brief Encounter,” this romance gains potency by denial. The love of decent homebody lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) for his fiance’s cousin, black sheep Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), symbolizes the whole society’s denial of true passion, art, even of much of the world outside.
It’s not a perfect film-perhaps appropriately, since one of the themes here is the danger of seeking “perfection.” But it’s a prodigious feat anyway, certainly one of the American movie triumphs of the year.
The whole look of “The Age of Innocence”-with its 15-course banquets, ballrooms and nights at the opera, its designs and costumes by Fellini’s team of Dante Ferretti and Gabriella Pescucci, its Michael Ballhaus cinematography and its shots of bouquets, blossoms and fire-has an almost ecstatic richness and glow. And the actors, a classy ensemble that also includes Winona Ryder as fiance May, Richard E. Grant and Alec McCowen as gossips, Miriam Margolyes as Mrs. Mingott, Sian Phillips as Newland’s mother, and Joanne Woodward as the narrator-serve up Wharton’s dialogue with both wry sophistication and raw emotion.
Scorsese’s sensibility often has seemed defined by rock ‘n’ roll, street slang. Yet this is a film where we’re cloistered in hideaways of privilege and rank, pride and prejudice-where we barely see the streets, and music is by Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Gounod and both Johann Strausses. Compared with the boiling tumult of the other great Scorsese movies-the Mulberry Street racket of “Mean Streets,” the ringside carnage of “Raging Bull,” the murderous sub-Mafia rumbles of “GoodFellas”-“The Age of Innocence” is quiet as a garden or a grave.
But only superficially. The velvet is all outside; underneath it, fires rage and storms rise. Ashes disperse in the sunlight. Purists may quibble about the casting, but Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer each give exactly what the film needs. They make passion palpable, suggest the blood beating beneath the silks and starches.
It’s irrelevant that Pfeiffer has blond ringlets and an irresistible cutie-pie smile instead of the darker looks Wharton described. It’s also irrelevant that Britisher Day-Lewis, playing an elite 19th Century lawyer, affects a curious mushy articulation that sometimes suggests John Malkovich on Sominex. What matters more deeply is that Day-Lewis shows us a man dissolving in love and pain under a carefully composed surface and that Pfieffer plays a woman who-shining with reckless, impulsive charm-might believably ignite the torch of a lifetime.
And, though Winona Ryder sometimes seems too delicate for athletic, serene, unimaginative May Welland, the girl whom Newland, increasingly against his will, is meant to marry, she catches something vital: the “blind, bright” faith in her world of which Wharton wrote.
Edith Jones Wharton wrote “The Age of Innocence” at 58, recalling a youth in which she suffered through a similarly “inappropriate” and squelched love affair. And though Scorsese’s approach is operatic and flamboyant, hers was dry, understated, deadly. She knew these people and mores profoundly, skewered them unerringly.
But in “The Age of Innocence,” Scorsese isn’t just exploring the lucid, troubling moral themes of the novel. He’s also expressing his whole love of the period romantic/historical film, the kind they don’t make anymore and whose financing-like the Western’s-evaporated in the ’80s.
Scorsese’s models are the great ironists and sophisticates, masters of style like Max Ophuls (“Letter From an Unknown Woman,” “The Earrings of Madame de . . .”), Luchino Visconti (“Senso,” “The Leopard”), William Wyler (“The Heiress,” which was this film’s acknowledged inspiration), and, of course, Orson Welles, whose virtuoso “Magnificent Ambersons” ballroom scene is recalled in the elaborate tracks and takes of “Age’s” Beaufort mansion ball.
The major flaw of “The Age of Innocence” may stem from a limitation of modern moviemaking. In the ’30s and ’50s, the exteriors of old New York could have been whipped up on a Hollywood soundstage with models, miniatures, stock footage or trick photography. Here, they’re simply eliminated from the picture. There are exteriors in “The Age of Innocence”-mostly in the second half-but rarely of the specific locales, such as 5th Avenue or Central Park, that define that special world. Their absence hangs heavy over the movie’s first hour, and when Scorsese includes one near-surreal shot of the “wilderness” above Central Park, surrounding Mrs. Mingott’s mansion, it’s as if he were trying to explain.
Yet the flaws of “The Age of Innocence” are the flaws of ambition, of love. It’s remarkable that Scorsese was able to get a film like this through the system at all-much less that he was able to get one so richly appointed, so faithful to Wharton’s vision, so spontaneous and vivid.
This sad, gorgeous film sweeps us away, teases us with grand possibilities-even though there’s always a tension and a darkness inside. And even though we know that, in the world it shows us, all love passes, all flowers die.
Movie review
“The Age of Innocence”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Scorsese and Jay Cocks, based on the novel by Edith Wharton; photographed by Michael Ballhaus; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; costumes designed by Gabriella Pescucci; production designed by Dante Ferretti; produced by Barbara de Fina. A Columbia Pictures release; opens Friday at 900 N. Michigan and outlying theaters. Running time 2:13. MPAA rating: PG.
THE CAST
Newland Archer………….Daniel Day-Lewis
Ellen Olenska…………..Michelle Pfeiffer
May Welland…………….Winona Ryder
Mrs. Mingott……………Miriam Margolyes
Larry Lefferts………….Richard E. Grant
Sillerton Jackson……….Alec McCowen
Narrator……………….Joanne Woodward
