Directed by Martin Scorsese

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder

Martin Scorsese directing a Merchant-Ivory film might superficially describe The Age of Innocence, but it would do an injustice to both parties. This is a Marty movie through and through—beautifully filmed, expertly acted, and thematically obsessed with guilt, passion, and moral failings.

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a lawyer from a prominent New York family. His engagement to the sweet but vapid socialite, May Welland (Winona Ryder), has more to do with social standing than with genuine love. This perfunctory arrangement seems satisfactory to Newland, until he meets May’s cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), a free-spirited woman arrived from Europe under a cloud of suspicion—her separation from her husband marks her immediately as a social outcast.

In meeting the Countess, Newland is about to embark for the “new land” of real love: she represents to him freedom from the constraints of his claustrophobic culture. Though Newland is reserved where the Countess is outspoken, they are kindred spirits in their desire for new experiences, new vistas. Note how longingly Newland thumbs through his book on Japan. Newland and the Countess fall in love, but their carefully stratified society conspires to keep them apart.

In adapting Edith Wharton’s classic novel of forbidden love in a repressive society, Scorsese has an anthropologists’ obsessive eye for cultural detail—the cutlery, the dainty dishes, the linen, the clothes. And of course the social rituals—the after-dinner brandy & cigar, opera-going audience gazing, and the handwritten notes attached to bouquets of flowers. The attention to surface texture in the film has a transporting effect; it is one of the best period pieces ever made.

Time-traveling to an unfamiliar milieu freed Scorsese’s aesthetic instincts. The Age of Innocence is hardly a polite study of quaint social customs; it is a passionate, adventurous film, dripping with color and breathtaking compositions. Scorsese revels in the texture of the world he and his collaborators have painstakingly recreated, a world where passions are lidded but bubble over in the form of colorful flower bouquets and passionate opera arias. This film belongs on a shortlist of the most physically ravishing films ever made (and not just because of Michelle Pfeiffer), but because Scorsese cuts loose with his painterly style of image-making.

Though a PG-rated period piece might seem like a departure for Scorsese (director of such gritty classics as Taxi Driver and The Departed), he observed that “This film deals with the same matters that can be found in my work in the last 25 years. There is guilt, desire, obsessed passion and the weakness to satisfy that passion.”

Notice how he describes the desire to satisfy passion as a “weakness.” This is what marks Scorsese as a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic filmmaker. Where most directors would romanticize the love affair between Newland and the Countess, Scorsese sees it as doomed from the start, and he is careful not to make either character (especially Newland) too sympathetic. In a calibrated performance, Day-Lewis suggests the agonizing tension beneath Newland’s polite surface—the muscles in his face tighten imperceptibly during certain exchanges—granting the viewer access to the anguish beneath his seeming compliance to a strict cultural code.

In The Age of Innocence, Newland has eaten of the fruit of passion, and the fact that Scorsese does not (necessarily) valorize his passion makes the film that much more interesting. Newland’s choice was between duty and passion, honor and real love. A less astute, less interesting filmmaker than Scorsese would have made the choice a no-brainer, damn the consequences. For most modern storytellers, passion is paramount. Passion is freedom. For Scorsese, passion has a dark side. Although he recognizes the hypocrisy and barely-concealed vindictiveness of aristocratic society, there remains something recognizably Old World about his sensibilities.

Posted by John Murphy on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 2:42 pm.