The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Chris Lester

Last seen November 2003. Although it's unfair, when I watch The Age of Innocence I cannot help comparing it in my mind with Terence Davies' astonishing The House of Mirth. Every good literary adaptation is, in part, a work of literary criticism, and these two artists, Davies and Scorsese, took different lessons from Edith Wharton. Davies used Lily Bart as a crypto-avatar, someone whose passions and desires were so unacceptable to her period and milieu that she was faced with a choice between dishonest or destruction. She chose the latter, but there was no heroism in her sacrifice. The House of Mirth was a feminist indictment of a culture of hypocrisy, something Davies felt all too acutely.

The Age of Innocence is a different animal, most obviously because here Wharton's conflicted emotional misfit is a man. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) has every opportunity to conform to the expectations of 19th century New York high society, and even when his transgression is recognized, he benefits from a code of conduct in which people disdain one another in private drawing rooms but remain convivial in public, all the better to maintain the strict, almost bureaucratic appearance of universal propriety. Scorsese, it seems, is a bit less interested in the agony of unrequited love than in the thick social veneer of Old New York, treating Wharton's world like an archaeological core sample of his own world before Italian immigration. (The fact that Scorsese dedicates The Age of Innocence to his father is a clue to his own interests. The film displays a WASPish, pseudo-European environment that seems centuries away from Gangs of New York, despite the actual proximity.)

Watching Age of Innocence this time, I was struck by just how perfectly modulated Winona Ryder's performance is. As many have said regarding Leonardo DiCaprio's role in Killers of the Flower Moon, it is a delicate thing to perform ignorance intelligently. And while the tragedy of May Welland is that she is in fact well aware of her husband's love for Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), she is so fully formed by this society of placid surfaces and presentability that she never once tips her hand to Newland. She understands that marriage is a contract and a strategic binding of powerful families, and that heartbreak, while cruel, is virtually beside the point. For Newland's part, he refuses to see May, misreading her conformity and capitulation as naivety.

Was Madame Olenska really so complex and passionate as Newland believed? Or did she simply represent the forbidden, a bomb he could detonate that would shatter his staid existence beyond repair? He is obviously a coward, someone convinced of his moral and intellectual superiority to his peers. But just as Scorsese perfectly captures Wharton's descriptive fixation on the accoutrements of new money -- the fine china, the dark mahogany paneling, the gaudy approximations of fine dining -- The Age of Innocence largely refrains from overt psychology. Newland's is not a well of loneliness, but a minor misalignment, a rift between male prerogative and rigid social demand.

As I was back in 2003, I remain ambivalent about Scorsese's use of narration. Joanne Woodward's delivery is flawless, and at its best this use of voiceover served to establish both the characters' desires and the "customs of the country." But Wharton's prose seems to be doing a  lot of heavy lifting, and I have to wonder if it allowed Scorsese to circumvent problems of adaptability, ones that might've been more interestingly explored. The use of directive irises, non-diegetic lighting cues, and the harsh sun glinting off Oleska's window in the final scene, demonstrate Scorsese's capability with visual thinking. So perhaps the narration serves as a contrast, a relationship between surface and depth. But I'm really not sure.

Final thought: Miriam Margolyes is just all kinds of awesome.