THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralph Benner
From the very start, with the Victorian calligraphy as the background for the blooming flowers during the credits, to the first scenes inside an opera house, with Gounod's "Faust" being performed, to the next set of views touring a splendidly highbrow 1870s New York mansion overflowing with a decor of velvet, art and stuffed mannequins as people, viewers are gasping at the implausibility: Can this really be a Martin Scorsese picture? Based on Edith Wharton's 1921 Pulitzer prize-winning novel about ill-conceived and hypocritical American upper-class adoption of European sophistication, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE at first glances might seem the atmospheric product of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. Hard to believe, but Scorsese equals them: made in honor of one of his favorite movies THE HEIRESS, and designed by Dante Ferretti, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE looks like a gilded age vision by Luchino Visconti, John De Cuir or John Box, and there's an undeniable resemblance to Ingmar Bergman's FANNY AND ALEXANDER. Like Bergman's feast, Scorsese's is so fancy and rich in detail--everything's splashed as layouts from Architectural Digest and Gourmet magazines--that you could get woozy and may have to hit the smelling salts. (Because Bergman packed in so much demonstrative warmth, some of us regretted not taking along the Vivirin.) But in perhaps the only touch of modernity that Scorsese risks in this his most audacious movie is that he allows the unrequited love between Wharton's soon-to-be-married Newland Archer and the rumored-to-be-loose Countess Ellen Olenska to not only sadden but also anger us. This isn't just a story or picture about stifling customs of denial or high society values; it's a story and picture about our hypocrisy over values--relinquishing ourselves to others' demands of imperatives we don't believe in.
Though David Lean was first in bringing E. M. Forster to the screen, with the pumped-up nothingness of A PASSAGE TO INDIA, most viewers rightly believe that Ivory and Merchant have more successfully brought the genteel sage to film in A ROOM WITH A VIEW, MAURICE and HOWARDS END. I've read in some national magazines that Scorsese's among the first to bring Wharton to viewing audiences, but this isn't so: the honorable ETHAN FROME was delivered three months prior, and came and went in a flash. (Maybe because Liam Neeson needed a co-star with at least as much of passion.) Wharton's THE OLD MAID was a 1935 award-winning play adapted by Zoe Atkins,and later a 1939 soaper starring Bette Davis. And deep into forgotten movie trivia is Wharton's 1922 THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON, made into a film that featured dialogue titles by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and there was a forgettable stage version of AGE starring Katharine Cornell and Franchet Tone. But Scorsese picked the right Wharton material as his first foray into the genre of American period piece: his two lovers are ruled by a snobbery of class not too much unlike the sociopaths and goons who rule over their victims in his charged-up modern Americana. The central difference, of course, is that there are no bloody corpses as pornography, though one could argue the lavish spreads of settings and food in AGE are rather porno-ish in their arbitrariness. Yet that's part of the appeal of Wharton: as much as she's criticizing the social dictums by which her characters are forced to live, she's trapped them in orgies of addicting lushness. And Wharton herself more than most: she was born into and lived the exceedingly pampered life of high social class New York. (Like Mark Twain before her and F. Scott Fitzgerald after, she did much of her writing in the comfort of her bed. Once, when she discovered that a hotel room bed did not face the light, she flew into a "fit of hysterics.") She was both protege of and travelling companion to Henry James, who is the most obvious influence on her as a writer: she picked up the exactitude of James's prose style, as well as interlacing her narratives with biting commentary, just as James did, especially in his THE BOSTONIANS, the seminal work out of which THE AGE OF INNOCENCE might have sprung. (Ironically, James Ivory directed the movie version of the pungently observed BOSTONIANS, and turned it into an undertaker's adaptation--all laid out and ready for burial.) Wharton, who was actually born in France and was the first woman win a Pulitizer Prise and receive an honorary degree from Yale, would perform readings, often at her chateau in Hyeres, of her works-in-progress in front of James and French novelist Paul Bourget, both of whom specialized in the psychological.
The gamble for Scorsese is that he didn't give in to what the movie audience is longing for--the coming together of Countess Olenska and Newland Archer. (Newbold is, by the way, Wharton's middle name.) Had he done so, only the purists would have howled, because our feelings of distrust for the dictates of others are blood-raw right now. That's why the conclusion gets to us in ways we're not prepared for: we can feel the pain in what the two doomed lovers are forced not to do--that there would be no real shame in flaunting disregard, especially in that divorce was already legally sanctioned by the state at the time. Wharton's caution, one that Scorsese is surprisingly subtle in delivering, is that the waste is even more hurting because these lovers are conspired against to prevent what the conspirators realize is much more than a flirtation. Olenska and Archer become victims to false propriety; they suspect it, the conspirators definitely know it, and we are left to suffer it. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is a march to folly, and in his only truly fine scenes, coming at a bon voyage dinner and at the end, Daniel Day-Lewis, as Newland, forces us to grieve for his loss, his own lack of courage. The audience in the theatre fell dead-silent as Newland, bracing himself with his cane as if it's his only fortitude, makes his decision, and for seconds afterwards no one moved.
When casting was announced, no one assumed Daniel Day-Lewis was wrong for the part of Archer, but there were rumblings about Michelle Pfeiffer as Olenska and Winona Ryder as Archer's soon-to-be-wife May Welland. It's the snot in those who bitched: somehow the prestigious Day-Lewis belongs in period costume, and Pfeiffer, despite being in DANGEROUS LIAISONS, and Ryder, despite being in BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA and LITTLE WOMEN, might not. But the tables turned and it's Day-Lewis who isn't quite suited for this story. No one can call him bad, but he's mostly unaffecting--until, of course, the ending. He seems disassembled--parts of him are there in a corner, weak and prissy and always it seems on the verge of tears; parts of him seem disbelievingly mansion-sized self-assured; parts of him simply don't make sense--like defending Countess Olenska in the first third of the story and then later denying himself the pleasures of his conquest. (We're talking about a 1870s New York City, which even then was a thriving metropolis, so did no snob ever utilize the city's largeness as a cloak of privacy?) Some of his scenes with Pfeiffer bring to mind Jeremy Irons' Charles Smithson in THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. Day-Lewis can be all of many things, and all at once, because he's one of the few very physically thin actors who imparts evolutionary credence; his frame has the uncanny ability to transmogrify itself. (In close-up, he's got a jutting jaw that we can sometimes get lost in.) Not yet the equivalent of Olivier, he is the other side of the Atlantic's version of our Dustin Hoffman. But since MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE, wherein he's indescribably right as a gay punker, he's become an icon of fakery. The smart set's still raving about his Tomas in Philip Kaufman's THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, in which he plays, of all things, a sex-obsessed brain surgeon-turned-window washer. He pours on the illicit naughty boy charm so thickly that it would be understand ably easy to assume he's sexy. Not quite; he's a vacuum--using his brows and the whites of his eyes and a day or two's growth of beard against his dark skin and his slinkiness to project the image of sexuality. Behind the facade is something limp: he's like a young Bradford Dillman, with just a hint of a satyric Rip Torn--only beautified. That women peel off their clothes for him as soon as he bats his moody eyes is fantasy, and it's charming in a feathery way, but what's missing is the heat of his seductions--they're as cold as UNBEARABLE's atmosphere. (He confirms the maxim that sometimes sex is best when it's confined to our imagination.) Wearing a top hat and heavily starched collars with more comic aplomb than any actor since Fred Astaire, he was a scream in an unexpected take-off as E.M. in Forster's own A ROOM WITH A VIEW. (A minority view--no one I kno w agrees.) While recognizing the torture in his greatness as Christy Brown in MY LEFT FOOT, I'm simply not a good enough human being to have been able to sit through its entirety. Yet what I derived out of what I saw is what has come to fore in Day-Lewis in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and now here in AGE. He's endlessly posing, alternately a still life of agony or an insufferable smoothie, dangerously self-satisfied with his own reflection. Though only the meteorologists earned their pay for MOHICANS (and 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE: when have two movies in the same year ever been so misty, foggy, cloudy, rainy, hazy?), Day-Lewis, in long hair and plentiful goodness, reminds us of Jeffrey Hunter's emblematic Christ in KING OF KINGS; he even resembles Hunter throughout the picture. It was during MOHICANS that I started to feel unsettled about Day-Lewis, and the way in which Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus defer to him here in AGE--and it starts with the very first shot of him--I don't think it's at all too early to consider that, in what may be his "artistry," he's becoming the movies' most accomplished con. David Strathairn would have been my choice for Newland.
Scorsese admitted in interviews that he in fact did defer a bit to Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. He mentioned that in the time between leaving their dress rooms and arriving on set, a transformation had occurred, that he began to believe his actors were the very parts they were playing, that he began to speak to them in hushed Whartonian tones. If Day-Lewis wallows in it too much, Pfeiffer keeps her wits about her and does to us what she didn't quite succeed in doing in DANGEROUS LIAISONS--get us to believe she belongs in antique melodrama. Her voice is the key, I think: it has that slightly pitched quality that happens to women of leisure, women who resign, though maybe not privately accept, that they're chattel to be displayed as pretty possessions. Ten years ago, Meryl Streep would have played this part but her voice, so theatrically calibrated, would have betrayed the novelist. (Even if unintentional, Pfeiffer honors Streep by pirating Sarah Woodruff's curly do.) Olenska has a bit of Wharton in her, in that the novelist was likewise strapped by a loveless marriage, and in Olenska is a homage to one of James' leading ladies in THE BOSTONIANS--Verena, the young, red-haired feminist spitfire. But Pfeiffer borrows from neither: this is her own portrait of a woman accepting defeat by convention and patronage. It's a performance built by mystery; there's no way for us to gauge her inner-feelings about the events by which she's stoically forced into acquiescence. (Only once does the performance lose focus: in a living room, she's smoking but the cigarette doesn't appear to be lit and when she exhales, no smoke comes out.) In DANGEROUS LIAISONS, as the sickly pale-faced Mme. de Tourvel, enduring medicinal therapies rented from Ken Russell's THE DEVILS, she seemed nearly out of her league against Glenn Close's venomous Marquise. Sublimely controlled as she dons her war paint, Close out-Sondergaards Gale Sondergaard and not even John Malkovich's devilishly puffed-up, wantonly vain Vicomte can altogether match her merciless glaze. (Wouldn't Close make a fab Madame Ming?) Next to John Gielgud, no performer has stolen scenes with more graceful arrogance and confidence. As a result, save for a scene or two, Pfeiffer is just about thrown right out of the picture. You begin to feel a strange, unwarranted sympathy for her; you tend to want to forget she's even in the picture. She didn't have to do anything in TEQUILA SUNRISE except look beautiful, and she does, and she gives her lines a crisp, singular reading. She did the same in MARRIED TO THE MOB, aided by the funny Mercedes Ruehl. Looking sensationally sexy in THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS she does a terrific "My Funny Valentine," and she sure knows how to rummage through her purse for and light up her Parisian Opals and she does a great slip off her feet into Jeff Bridges's arms as they're dancing to "Moonglow" on a hotel room balcony. (The semi-downer ending, though, makes us ask, "Why bother?") I had some sympathy for her in BATMAN RETURNS: in spite of the trash the costumers put her in, and acknowledging that she has a wicked whiplash, she's stuck in the horror of one unplayable scene after another. How she managed to keep her self-respect is beyond me. (The most clever thing about that bumme r is the Queen's Coat that the Penguin wears; when he's walking around the cemetery where his parents are buried, he looks like something out of a novel by Dickens.)
Out of Dickens as well, and crossed with Aunt Pittypat from GWTW, Miriam Margolyes gives the audience its best laugh as moneybags Mrs. Manson Mingott. Unfortunately looking none too well, the late Alexis Smith is New York's numero uno grand dame. Had she been aided by the right kind of and more sensitive makeup artist, she'd have passed for Wharton. (This small part quite a contrast to Miss Smith's last TV role--as Rebecca's former school teacher who still has enough sexual power to charge Sam's batteries in CHEERS.) Chubby in the face, Mary Beth Hurt is nearly unrecognizable as Mrs. Beaufort. As her philandering cad of a husband, Stuart Wilson could be doing a tribute to Rod Steiger's Komarovsky from DOCTOR ZHIVAGO And it takes a while to get our bearings and recognize him and remember when last we might have seen him: as Major Clark, who impregnates Sarah Layton, in THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN. Last, but not least (because of the rest of the supporting cast is very good), there's Winona Ryder. The breathless May will only succeed if Ryder can pull off the coup de theatre. If we hate the character for doing it, whether we know it's coming or not, then Ryder can only be applauded. The act is not only one of desperation, but the pinnacle of despised entrapment.
In MAUGHAM, biographer Ted Morgan writes that W. Somerset "was exasperated by the rightness and exactness of everything Edith Wharton said." He was particularly out of joint by her usage of the word "no," for he "had never heard a more frigid syllable of disapproval." Maugham snarled, "Her manner was that of a woman to whom a man has made proposals offensive to her modesty, but which good breeding tells her it will be more dignified to ignore than to make a scene about." Indeed, the very essence of Wharton as social prisoner and writer: she was on the side of the expression of love and sex but never had much guts to engage in either. Perhaps Wharton was poisoned by her mother's frigidity, which might also have helped make her the anti-feminist she appeared to be, in that she opposed education of women for high professions, didn't exercise her right to vote, nor bothered to invite other women to social parties she threw. Maybe she was further poisoned by her supposed love affair with bisexual Morton Fullerton. (A recent biographer suggests Wharton was both homophobic and anti-Semitic, an d disapproved of such writers as Joyce and Lawrence; one wonders if she was truly aware of Henry James' predilections.) It's this Victorian vengeance in her writing that's regretful and sad--and painful for audiences watching AGE: she's compulsive about punishing her fictional lovers. (She punished them in ETHAN FROME, too.) Scorsese caught this, but he didn't do it alone: TIME critic Jay Cocks ferreted out the Wharton upbraidings and helped shape them into a screenplay that not only envenoms denied passions but also exalts the power of words. This is what's surprisingly wonderful about the movie: in the past we've come to expect that we're going to get short-changed when moviemakers bring the classics to screen--images over words or vice versa, debatable truncation. It's thrilling to not only hear the text captured with this much respect, but to see the images come close to matching the era is almost unnerving: included are reel life versions of Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" and winter scenes by Richard Hartmann and Childe Hassam. And there's a happy marriage of editing and text: Thelma Schoonmaker (who gets her name plastered as an advertisement within the movie) lays on montages of messages and invitations that enhance the art of personal writing. (Experts in communication believed that on-line services might resurrect this art form; it turns out that e-mail & uploads have degenerated into "it sucks" brevity.) THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is so respectful of Wharton that her running commentary is voiced over by Joanne Woodward, caught as if parenthetical privacies whispered for our ears only. The only damn thing wrong with this feast is that after it ended, I felt like sneaking into a Weight Watchers meeting.
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