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.

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Directed by Luchino Visconti

Starring Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andresen, Marisa Berenson

A widowed German composer, suffering from ill-health and general decrepitude, travels to Venice for a respite. There he encounters Beauty in distilled form: the young Tadzio, vacationing in Venice with his family. The composer, Gustav von Aschenbach, becomes obsessed with the 14-year old boy as a kind of Platonic ideal of Youth before dying on a lonely stretch of beach.

If you think I’ve given the plot away, you didn’t consider the title of the movie too carefully. Freely adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice is a masterpiece of atmosphere. The ‘plot,’ so-called, is a series of mostly fleeting encounters between the old man and the object of his attention. In flashbacks, we see Aschenbach as a passionate, engaged intellectual arguing for the ’spirituality’ of Beauty as an abstract ideal, “The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.” In the present, he is a broken, isolated man lingering like a mute ghost in a disintegrating city.

Much has been made of the homoeroticism of Aschenbach’s fixation with Tadzio. Generally interpreted as unconsummated pedophilic desire, the relationship could just as easily be read as an old man’s single-minded pursuit of Beauty as an ideal (the perfectly cast Bjorn Andresen as Tadzio has an androgynous beauty, like a Botticelli angel; his Apollonian distance personifies the abstract ideal that the younger Aschenbach espoused). Tadzio is not so much an object of desire as an object d’art; the dying dream of an old man trying vainly to reclaim the lost ideal of Youth.

Directed by Italian master, Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, The Damned), Death in Venice is a tone-poem; an often arrestingly beautiful meditation on youth, obsession, old age, and the decrepit state of Western Civilization. The Catholic overtones are like a warning: the composer is from Munich, a particularly Catholic city in Germany. Tadzio’s family is Polish, also Catholic. Venice, with St. Mark’s cathedral as its centerpiece, is a dream city of beautiful surfaces and gorgeous architecture. It is also a crumbling, sinking city that relies on the cannibalization of its past to stay afloat, so to speak. Tourists flock to Venice as to a beautiful ruin. With today’s waning churchgoing in Europe and the gradual depletion of its population, one can’t help but think that Mann had been prophetic in his diagnosis of Western Europe as a decaying body obsessed with its beautiful youth, vainly attempting to keep up appearances. As the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote, “We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.”

At one point, Aschenbach undergoes a make-over to try and make himself look younger, more appealing to his Tadzio. The result is sad, disturbing; Aschenbach’s hair dye bleeds down his forehead as he bakes under the hot Venetian sun, staring out at the slim figure of Tadzio wading out to sea. Visconti always frames Aschenbach on the periphery of the frame, as if he might irrevocably slip off the screen at any moment.

Though Visconti’s deliberate pace and long, lingering shots may try the viewer’s patience, Death in Venice is more than worth the effort. The cinematography is often ravishing and Visconti makes masterful use of Gustav Mahler�s lush, aching fifth Symphony. The tortured Romance of Mahler�s music grants us access to the volcanic passions beneath Aschenbach’s meticulously reserved surface — Aschenbach even resembles Mahler.

The best reason to see Death in Venice is Dirk Bogarde’s careful, fully realized performance as the highly cultured but emotionally stunted Aschenbach. His portrayal of the fragile intellectual in his waning years is a masterpiece of understatement. With very little dialogue, he is able to convey Aschenbach’s bitterness, misanthropy, loneliness, obsession, and pathetic hope for reciprocated affection through a complex network of looks, expressions, gestures, and body language. (Two of cinema’s most expressive, soulful eyes certainly help.) This is one of the loneliest films ever lensed, and Bogarde’s performance beautifully empathizes with a man cut-off from the rest of humanity.

Bogarde completely inhabits Aschenbach. In a film that borders occasionally on the insufferably pretentious, he compels the viewer’s attention; he keeps our interest by making his character’s existential suffering real, embarrassing, pitiable, and heartbreaking all at once. The last scene is a tour-de-force; an aria of lost hope, passion, and tragedy.

Death in Venice takes its time, but builds to a surprisingly emotional climax. Though not for all tastes, the film’s virtues are many, not least of which is Dirk Bogarde as Aschenbach — one of cinema’s greatest actors delivering a towering, heart-wrenching performance.

(A keen-eyed Amazon reviewer noted that both the steamer that carries Aschenbach to Venice and the prostitute he visits in a flashback are named “Esmeralda.” This, of course, is the name Victor Hugo bequeathed to the idealized object of Quasimodo’s affection/obsession in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Make of this what you will, but no one can say Visconti isn�’ a stickler for telling details.)

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Directed by Milos Forman

Starring F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce

reviewed by John Murphy

Beloved of God

Amadeus nabbed an impressive 8 Academy Awards in 1984, including Best Picture and Best Director for Milos Forman. All awards were well-deserved. Rarely does a movie come along this bursting with life, wit, and energy.

For viewers who think opera is all about shrill-shrieking sopranos in body armor and pigtails, Amadeus makes a great introduction to the life and times of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the towering genius of classical music. As portrayed in this imaginative biopic, Mozart was more of a rock star than a stuffy old composer: rebellious, egotistical, childish, brilliant, and bored with the staid conventions of state-sponsored opera (featuring Grecian characters “so lofty they sound as if they shit marble,” as he so memorably puts it).

Though Mozart makes a delightfully paradoxical protagonist — an infantile genius played to the hilt by a deliriously brilliant Tom Hulce — Amadeus’ most memorable character is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), Herr Mozart’s rival composer in the Austrian court of Emperor Joseph II (portrayed with dry hilarity by Jeffrey Jones). Vienna, the City of Music, is the seat of an emperor known in his time as “the Musical King” because of his passion for opera. “Actually,” corrects Salieri, “the man had no ear at all. But what did it matter? He adored my music.”

Into Salieri’s self-satisfied sphere steps the musical prodigy, Mozart, who had been the envy of Salieri’s obscure youth: “This man had written his first concerto at the age of four, his first symphony at seven, a full-scale opera at twelve.” Salieri, eager to meet the Infant Phenomenon, wonders as he wanders the court, seeking Mozart: “Did it show? Is talent like that written on the face?”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the man whose very name, ‘Amadeus,’ translates into ‘Beloved of God,’ turns out to be a spoiled, infantile, vulgar little man of little virtue and even less manners; a “giggling, dirty-minded creature” in Salieri’s estimation. This encounter with Genius precipitates in our narrator an existential crisis; how to reconcile Mozart’s heavenly music — “the Voice of God” is how Salieri describes it — with a vain, petulant, puerile creature.

Salieri possesses just enough musical talent to appreciate Mozart’s incomparable genius. He worships Mozart’s gift for music “finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note, and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.” His face appears transfixed, as if in religious ecstasy, when he sight-reads the miraculously pure sheets of Mozart’s first-drafted music. Salieri burns with the desire, like a “lust” he calls it, to write music such as this, but he can only recognize the talent in another. Yet “why would God choose an obscene child as His instrument?”

This is Salieri’s existential question, the central question of the play and film, and part of the enduring mystery of Mozart, and the enduring mystery of inexplicable genius. If Salieri’s dilemma wasn’t to some degree universal, the film would be less successful than it is. As written, the audience confronts with Salieri God’s apparent caprice when it comes to dispensing talent. Who hasn’t drunk from the bitter cup of envy? In God’s grand scheme of things, only a few lights ever burn as bright as Mozart’s. Imagine all the other painters and sculptors in Michelangelo’s Rome diminished by comparison. Imagine the other filmmakers who stood by while 24-year old Orson Welles released Citizen Kane. Imagine the would-be novelists who read Joseph Conrad (for whom English was a third language) and gave up writing on the spot. “All I ever wanted,” Salieri says, “was to sing to God. He gave me that longing, and then made me mute� Why? Tell me that.” The priest has no answer.

But because it’s such a good question, Salieri belongs to that strange celestial of fallen angels, ranking alongside Milton’s Lucifer, Kubrick’s HAL 9000, and Shakespeare’s Iago as one of the all-time great villains. Like “honest” Iago, the devilish sociopath in Othello, Salieri is a clever, devious man bent on destruction. Because he could never create a work of art to rival Mozart, he chooses to destroy “God’s instrument.”

The difference may be that Iago was something of a creative genius, a kind of puppet master controlling the people around him like marionettes. Salieri, on the other hand, dubs himself the “Patron Saint of Mediocrities.” The script by Peter Shaffer, adapted from his own play, invents a truly fascinating and original bad guy. Abraham does the part justice with a rich, multilayered performance (though I confess I’d love to have seen the great Ian Mckellen incarnate the role on stage). Salieri is by turns preening, bitter, sardonic, and nihilistic, and Abraham covers those bases with apparent ease. Never has sheer mediocrity been so compelling.

Czech director Milos Forman, who also helmed the devastating classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest, seems drawn to stories about vigorous, vital eccentrics (whether McMurphy or Mozart) undone by bitterness and resentment. He orchestrates the elements of Amadeus masterfully. The movie is a harmonious marriage of sight and sound, Mozartian in its effortless wit, grand passions, and lyrical beauty. Certain passages of the film play like big-budgeted Mozart music videos, and I mean that as a compliment. The film is visually and aurally ravishing; “operatic” in the best sense: powerful, epic, and writ large.

Salieri would seethe with jealousy.

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