When glancing at Scorsese’s enormous oeuvre, 1993’s The Age of Innocence certainly looks like an outlier hidden among the De Niro-starring crime/action thrillers Cape Fear, Goodfellas and Casino. The Age of Innocence is instead a slower, quieter film set mostly in the 1870s and based on a celebrated Edith Wharton novel. Rather than Mafiosos stomping unfortunates into submission, this is a film with stuffily dressed, pompous people making romantic connections in the stilted high society of Gilded Age New York. But for all its thematic divergence from the typical Scorsese fare, The Age of Innocence, upon viewing, remains a decidedly Scorsese production.
The greatest signature of Scorsese on the film is the way that he treats the major characters. These obscenely rich snobs who make up the cast are execrable, vapid and truculent. They are as unlikeable as the gangsters, crooks, drug addicts and rip-off artists that populate most of Scorsese’s other films. In fact, most of them are just a different version of crooks and rip-off artists, having built their mansions with money made from the slave trade and the exploitation of immigrant laborers. Yet, just as he does in The Irishman or Goodfellas (as two examples among dozens), he presents these characters without heavy-handed commentary. He has made a career of holding up unpleasant people for examination, revealing all of their ugliness without putting it in flashing neon lights and allowing the audience to do the intellectual work of concluding that these people are depraved. Scorsese trusts his viewers here, for example, to see how utterly clueless Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is regarding his scheming to abandon his fiancé May Welland (Winona Ryder) for her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). Newland never considers how sharp-witted the women are and assumes that his lifetime of (inherited, assured) success is indicative of his great genius in manipulating circumstances. Newland does not know he is being obvious, predatory and setting up a life-long inferiority complex for his soon-to-be-wife. Scorsese does not hammer us over the head with what this means and viewers are free to sympathize with three central players in the love triangle and/or to giggle at what a dolt Newland is. Each of the three are thoroughly humanized, warts and all.
Another major Scorsese trademark here is that The Age of Innocence is a New York story. The great director occasionally ventured outside the five boroughs for his cinematic works, but few filmmakers – perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson with the Valley – have ever had the fidelity to a single location quite as ardently as Scorsese has had with New York. The Age of Innocence is not his only period piece set in the city – he would return to the late nineteenth century with Gangs of New York – but it is the only one that deals with the drawing room dramas of the upper crust rather than the gutter violence of the lower classes. Like with his contemporary pieces, he brilliantly highlights the legal, acceptable immorality of the rich and powerful.
Finally, like all Scorsese films, The Age of Innocence whips and slides the camera in innumerable clever ways to change the viewer’s perspective, homage previous films and become a narrative part of the film. In the opening scene at the opera, there is a shot that puts the film viewer in the opera house’s audience, multiple binocular shots, multiple instances of the camera leaning in to whispering actors to eavesdrop on their conversations and a long dolly shot of Newland in the lobby that begins as a POV from his eyes and becomes a tracking shot. That is all in the first few minutes. In addition, Scorsese homages such masters as Jean Vigo and Ingmar Bergman, the latter with a jarring-yet-effective cutaway to May Welland reading a telegram to her husband via a direct-to-camera address (something Bergman did in Winter Light, another story about unhappily entangled lovers).
The Age of Innocence is easy to skip past when viewing all of Martin Scorsese’s films. It is a long, slow costume drama about unbearably vacuous snobs that does not match up with the likes of Casino and The Departed for pace and body count. It even relies on voiceover narration to carry much of the story. But The Age of Innocence is trademark Scorsese in countless engaging ways and should not be missed.
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