Happy Birthday, Martin Scorsese - THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)

Figured for an (80th!) Birthday, on the eve of anyway, time to revisit one of the films of Martin Scorsese's that I have seen the least (maybe just once straight through!)  I'm glad I did.  

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Of course given his own innumerable references to other films, in interviews and lectures as well as his own pictures, the simplest thing to jump to is "Martin Scorsese's Barry Lyndon" as the touchstone here for its complete pictorial and effervescent splendor, that like 90% of any single frame here is a painting quite almost literally through precise costume, framing, soft but not sickeningly sweet soft lighting and shadows that emphasize an inner turmoil that runs deeper than for almost any of the characters in the "grittier" Scorsese work - not just that shot, but *that* one, and heavens how about that other one with Olenaka standing by the pier not turning around, or Newland in the flower shop or the one the one I gotta stop now.  But what I find most telling is an introduction the NYFF restoration some years ago, where he was thinking a bit about the scene from Citizen Kane where Mr Bernstein is describing seeing the girl on the ferry and "not a day goes by I don't think about her," and that's it, in all it's equal simplicity and complexity: longing for what was, a nostalgia for a time and place that shaped someone into not the best one could be, but... it's what it is? 

 

I saw this sometime in high school or maybe college, and like another Winona Ryder film by another American filmmaker titan of the same period, Coppola with Dracula, I either took it for granted or just wasn't so mature or cinema literate enough to appreciate it more (or I simply hadn't become much of an adult to understand what, true burning down your f*****g heart alive, love means to have and to hold - luckily in my case I found it, but that's another story).  I thing the "Love that Dareth Not Speak" with this intense Emotional Affair isn't a new thing to see in cinema, but it's how a filmmaker can go about it, making the subjects in the matter become alive, that is what counts.  This is one of the most gorgeously rendered visions of a world of another time of my generstion, and yet in its way the trap of opulence and a society that is violent and unforgiving in its etiquette that sticks with one as much after as during the film. 

This is a world that is meant to be the Top of the Heap, as an old fashioned person might put it today, but when you are formed and shaped by it, and someone may confuse weakness with a loyalty to that world (or is it the other way around), it's hard to break from it.  Newland could, but maybe he couldn't.  And maybe The Countess Olenska would have trouble as well - but just simply that moment where she describes to Newland about the simple feeling of being FREE, well... that shakes him to his core.

Day Lewis, Pfeiffer and, though I wonder if she was slightly less appreciated due to seeming to be playing more of a "shallow" character but there's more there, Ryder, are phenomenal, mostly for how much I'm sure Scorsese gives them time in every scene to *show* so much.  I especially like how it's the women who get to really lead the way for many of the scenes, even if it seems like DDL is doing his IM THE MOST INTENSE ACTOR OF ALL TIME thing in restrained costume decor.  But unlike another film not quite of this period but close enough that I saw earlier this year with him, A Room with a View, where he was somewhat similarly repressed and bourgeois, Day Lewis understands that Archer is a good person deep down and has a firm intelligence... but that goodness and firmness is as much a hindrance as an asset.  I liked that be found this middle ground between holding back things in some moments but most often it's very easy to read what's going on on his face.  How some of the characters don't comment on it more regularly maybe speaks to a more fundamental horror lurking underneath this world of refinery.

But it is the women who make their mark the most, and it's maybe the ultimate example that has to be given to people who say that this director only makes "Guy" movies.  I'd call BS on that anyway given the 50 examples off the top of my head of great women characters in Scorsese pictures.  At the same time, Ellen and May and Pfeiffer and Ryder by extension are so so effective in what they're given to do and, like the best actors, they go a little further - just see how much or how little they may pause before certain (very pivotal) lines or how a look can be given right back to Newland to such an extent that it's like a dagger, or like a tease, or like a true beat of innocence. 

Case in point, late in the movie I turned to my wife and said 'do you think May knows?' And this does get answered more or less, but in the moment it's still played with perfect, delicious ambiguity as it is in life- sometimes someone knows if another in a relationship feels a way about someone else, or maybe it's just part of one.  At any rate, while it is (arguably) Pfeiffer's greatest work of her career, Ryder shouldn't be underestimated for what she does just as, in her seemingly mild way, as fforcefully. Lest not forget, after all, May is a product of her environs and, as with Archer, too good to say the wrong thing most often (the one time she broaches the disconnect between them he shoots it down, and it's quite a delicate moment of tense drama). 

This is, again like Coppola's Dracula, grand opera rendered on film (via Columbia again no less), though the difference here is the characters don't, or can't, or won't, just GO for their emotional register.  It's no less a tragedy, except this is about decorum as opposed to Grand Gugnol.  It's (yawn) another masterpiece, overflowing with a love of what atmosphere and language can do to a character piece, but to call it that maybe underrates what deeper themes about conformity and loss this wrestles with.  Like the dishes we see in the film, it's easy to call it beautiful.  A life has to be made out of what is left.