Martin Scorsese Week: The Age of Innocence (1993)

1 year ago

Martin Scorsese Week: The Age of Innocence (1993)

SO PRECARIOUSLY THAT ITS HARMONY COULD BE SHATTERED BY A WHISPER

by Sarah Malone

When BWDR announced Scorsese week, The Age of Innocence—Scorsese’s period piece that’s not Gangs of New York—was fresh in my mind because the novel it was adapted from had been mentioned in a recent New York Review of Books blog post about Mad Men:

A major theme in literature is a wistful regard for life as it was lived some forty or fifty years earlier, typified by Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), which looked back at upper-class mores in 1870s New York.

Wistful? More like “profoundly regretful”; Wharton only returns to the high society of her youth (with some geographic liberties) to demolish it, and Scorsese’s adaptation, for all its sumptuous interiors, is no nostalgic wallow in bygone graces. In fact I found it a cold movie, with little feeling apparent in the dialogue. I think that’s Scorsese’s intention. He wants us to leave our postmodern sensibilities at the door of the opera house where we first encounter the main characters, and experience them on their own terms.

Scorsese’s method is to keep the characters at a distance; the narrative voiceover, taken directly from Wharton’s text and spoken by Joanne Woodward with a sweetness that becomes increasingly, chillingly, insufficient to the soul wringing onscreen, prevents any sustained illusion of the “fourth wall” coming down. We are being told a tale. We can be an audience to the past, but we cannot enter.

The plot is drawn out through so many drawing rooms, dinner parties and not-so-subtle slights that events feel linked less by cause and effect than by all of them being similarly mired in social customs and obligations. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), a well-to-do New York lawyer, and May Welland (Winona Ryder) are about to announce their engagement, at a post-opera ball. May’s cousin Ellen has returned to America alone (shock!) from her unhappy marriage to a Polish count. Upper crust New York disapproves; while plenty of affairs go on behind the seamless surface of things, open disregard for convention is unforgivable.

But Ellen wants a divorce; Newland, a lawyer, is asked to dissuade her from such a scandalous course, since she would not in any event be able to wed again with respectability. Respectability is everything to Newland—until, talking with Ellen, he begins to wonder if happiness, or at least passion, might not be something, too.

The complaint so often made against literary fiction, that nothing happens, is precisely the tragedy of The Age of Innocence. Newland is no Count Vronsky. His first response to his amorous feelings for Ellen? To hurry his engagement to May!

Even May questions his rush, and his motivations. No, Archer insists. In his assiduousness in fending off passion, he becomes a liar to May and to himself. Day-Lewis plays Archer so mealy-mouthed it’s difficult to picture him the year before in The Last of the Mohicans, yelling for Cora to “Stay alive! Stay alive and I will find you!” (Mohicans, also based on a novel that was a period piece when published, doesn’t have Scorsese’s compunctions about importing contemporary syntax). By the time Newland makes halting moves towards Ellen, doing so means cheating not on his fiancée but on his wife. Society rallies to her. As inexorably as Lily Bart is cast out of society in Wharton’s House of Mirth, Newland is pulled into it, kept from giving Ellen a ride home, prevented from following her abroad. May, it turns out, is pregnant. So intent on finagling an affair, Newland doesn’t realize until too late that everyone thinks he is already having one. The appearance of impropriety is impropriety.

Stories have different shapes. The Age of Innocence builds tension slowly but continuously until the last scene of the main (1870s) action, when May tells Newland, “I’ve been sure since this morning of something I’ve been so longing and hoping for,” and he realizes, through her apparently inadvertent admission, that she’d told Ellen about her pregnancy before being certain of it, knowing it would make Ellen give up Newland. Scorsese keeps May so blank, so childlike and deferential up until this scene—she doesn’t get much screen time and we have little sense that she wants anything other than what society has brought her up to want—that her announcement is absolutely blood-curdling. What should be a shared joy becomes a power play. The voiceover pulls back and lets the scene play out. It’s agony. Newland is a liar, terrified of his feelings and willing to disregard those of others; but he also is stumbling towards more modern, recognizable longings, and his relationship with May seems like only the form of a marriage. But for their time and milieu, form was paramount. If Scorsese had made May a full-fledged character, the drama would be ‘only’ personal. As it is, she is Society itself, social pressure rarefied into a force of nature. She cannot be resisted and she knows not what she does. And she is confident (correctly) that Newland doesn’t have the strength to rebel.

The Age of Innocence, with its voiceover and its formal diction giving the dialogue, especially early in the movie, a recited quality, is unusually open about its narrative control. We’re more used to the illusion of being able to make up our own minds about how to read what’s going on, whereas Scorsese only lets selected scenes play out. Re-reading Wharton’s novel (available for download) I found myself agreeing with his decision to keep such large portions of her narration, her distinctive tone and choice of details, conveying the otherness of these people, and of the narrator who chose to tell us about them.

Scorsese’s active camera suits the way Wharton’s narrator guides our attention. Scorsese reprises his famous Goodfellas camera move, following Newland through the various rooms of a party in a single, continuous take so smooth you don’t notice its virtuosity until you try to map out the path he’s taken you on. The camera orbits a table as May’s family talks—maddeningly, because we know Ellen is waiting for Archer, who decides not to go to her.

For all Scorsese and Wharton’s focus on the power of societal forces that individuals only play out, Newland chooses his life. He chooses according to his nature, personality and limits, maybe; but he has the means to see Ellen, and when the story jumps to the present (Wharton’s present, 1920), he chooses not to. He has gone to Paris with his son, who has made an appointment to call on her (too tidy, maybe; but isn’t it what has to happen?) May has died, as has Ellen’s husband. It’s a different era; no obstacles remain to Newland and Archer getting together. No external obstacles; himself to the last, Newland fears that reality will invalidate his idea of Ellen, and, though downstairs from Ellen’s apartment, turns away, as he had years earlier.

“Call me old-fashioned,” he tells his son.

There’s an interlude two-thirds through the movie, after Newland has gone to see Ellen alone, lying to May about his whereabouts, one of his crucial missteps that confirm her danger to her. But Ellen refuses to run off with him.

“You gave me my first glimpse of a real life,” he says, “and then you told me to carry on with a false one. No one can endure that.”

“I’m enduring it,” she says.

Then Scorsese fades into one of the film’s few shots of the Manhattan crowds that Newland, May, Ellen and company must have had to contend with daily, whatever their riches, even if only as traffic blocking their carriages. Bowler hatted men in brown, black and grey, hold their hat brims against the wind, maybe against the downdrafts from one of the new skyscrapers being flung up ten, twenty, thirty stories. It’s a slow-motion shot, set to a woman singing, “…that you loved me still the same.” None of the men look up at us. They are all on their way somewhere. They do not know they’re in a movie. They do not know they’re in the past.

Starting a story forty or fifty years before the present lets us witness lives settling in their molds until personality becomes indistinguishable from habit, change too arduous or fraught to contemplate. It is wistful only if we interject our notions; if only they’d known, if only they’d done x or y; but as Scorsese scrupulously reminds us, they did what they could.