THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel is like a beautiful, detailed painting of an entire period, yet it remains static and uninvolving. The characters seem to be all bland and mostly convention-bound. By the time we can work up any pathos for the principals, it is too late. Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4).
Somehow one of the last things we would have expected from Martin Scorsese is is a foray into the Merchant-Ivory territory of adapting the early-20th Century social novel. That is exactly the field he is entering with THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, but his results are of mixed quality. He has created a beautiful recreation of 1870s New York City high society and the bloodlessness that it required from its denizens, but in doing that so well, he has created characters that it is hard to care very much for and their story is considerably less engaging as a result.
The story is of a love triangle that flies in the face of he conventions of society. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Newland Archer, a handsome and intelligent young lawyer engaged to May Welland, a lovely childlike woman played by Winona Ryder. Newland meets and is struck by May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska (played by Michelle Pfeiffer). The Countess is rebounding from the scandal of having left her husband, a Polish Count, but upper-class society will not let her forget her past. Newland slowly realizes that he really loves the countess and that she loves him, but he cannot decide if he is willing to fly in the face of convention. And for roughly two hours of screentime this latter-day Hamlet remains indecisive. Certainly things happen in that time, but this heart of the story does not advance until it is over.
What we get in that static two hours is a beautiful depiction of society in that time and place. Lavish detail shows us what parties were like, what food was eaten at lavish social dinners, what table arrangement there was, what the streets looked like (though many of the exteriors had unconvincing matte paintings that called attention to themselves). Watching this film reminded me a lot of my visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A segment of society is perfectly preserved in this film.
The visuals, however, are almost unused in telling the story. This story is almost literally a novel on film. The story is told in words in dialog and narration. The narration is by Joanne Woodward, and is said to be a late enhancement to clarify the plotline after editing the film down to 136 minutes. In any case this is a film that genuinely requires concentration on the dialog and a good memory for character names. There are a lot of characters in the book and Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese did not pare them down by many in the screenplay. The film boasts an impressive cast including Richard E. Grant, Alec McCowan, Geraldine Chaplin (could this be a sly nod to plot similarities in DR. ZHIVAGO?), Mary Beth Hurt, Sian Phillips, Michael Gough, Alexis Smith, Jonathan Pryce, and Robert Sean Leonard.
Notable also is another great opening credit sequence by the master photographer of such sequences, Saul Bass (and Elaine Bass). Saul Bass is the Michelangelo of film credit sequences.
There is a lot that works in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and a few very basic and important aspects that fail. This is an accurate adaptation of a classic novel not well suited to film adaptation. My rating would be a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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