Synopsis
In New York City of the 1870s, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is among the well-heeled attending an Academy of Music performance of the opera Faust. Newland is taken aback by the appearance of the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who’s left her husband in Europe and become an object of great scandal by returning to her family. Newland is engaged to Ellen’s innocent, pampered cousin May (Winona Ryder). To discourage gossip against the family, he announces his engagement to May at an opera ball that night. When Ellen doesn’t attend, Newland seems disappointed. He goes out of his way to ingratiate her back into the favor of New York society, with the help of May’s reclusive grandmother Manson Mingott (Miriam Margolyes), who is practically empress of this world.

Sensing she might feel lonely, Newland wants to help the free spirited and exotic Ellen. “Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it was all straight up and down, like 5th Avenue, all the cross streets numbered and big honest labels on everything.” “Everything is labeled,” he tells her, “but everybody is not.” Behind closed doors, Newland questions conformity. In public, he upholds family and tradition. “This was a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper,” says our narrator (Joanne Woodward). The Mingotts enlist Newland to dissuade Ellen from seeking a divorce, but he finds himself falling in love with her. He tries to speed up his engagement to May, who correctly guesses he’s in love with someone else. Her fiancé denies this.

For Newland, responsibility to his mother and sister, who rely on him for every security, comes before his own desires. A year and a half later, Ellen returns to New York when Mrs. Mingott suffers a stroke. Newland goes to meet her at the train station. They share a carriage ride, where a simple touch of Ellen’s wrist qualifies as a consummation of their affair. Ellen refuses to take it any further for fear it will hurt May. Meeting each other at the Metropolitan Museum, Ellen changes her mind about the prospect of an affair. Newland finally decides to confess his feelings to his wife, but she interrupts to tell him that Ellen is returning to her husband. Newland realizes that his family and all of New York society have conspired to send her back to Europe to preserve decorum.

Production history
From September 1919 to March 1920, Edith Wharton wrote most of The Age of Innocence while living in the Rue de Varenne of Paris. Her sister-in-law Minnie Jones helped research 1870s New York society by combing through back issues of the New York Tribune at Yale University Library. Published in 1920 in serial format, then as a novel, The Age of Innocence became a phenomenal bestseller. Columbia University awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Literature - making Wharton the first woman to receive the honor – and within two years, the author had reaped $50,000 in royalties, including $15,000 from Warner Bros. for the film rights. The studio produced a seven-reel feature in 1924, while RKO mounted a talkie version in 1931 starring Irene Dunne as Countess Ellen Olenska. Neither was a box office success.

Sixty years after its publication, Jay Cocks – former film critic for Time Magazine – handed a copy of The Age of Innocence to his friend, director Martin Scorsese. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1993, Scorsese recalled, “We had known each other since ‘68 and over the years we saw so many different films and over the years we really tried to write scripts together and do all kinds of projects and really got involved with wanting to do many different genres: westerns, costume pieces – you could call them costume pieces – romantic films, musicals, etcetera. And so around 1980 he gave me the book and said, ‘When you decide to do that romance piece,’ he said, ‘this one is you.’ Meaning this has the qualities that you would like.’”

Scorsese continued, “When I finally did read the book – because when he gave me the book I was finishing Raging Bull and I was going into King of Comedy – and in a sense, Raging Bull is a picture that is spinning. It’s like a vortex of emotion. I was very much into that state of mind. So it took me a while to sit down and read the book. But when I did, I reacted immediately to the passion of the love story between Archer and Ellen and especially the fact that it’s unconsummated … maybe because I read it and it was 1987, January and I had gotten older, but I reacted immediately to that. I must tell you that I’ve read other books - I’ve loved the books of Thomas Hardy and other types of classical literature and 19th century English literature - but this one, I said I can make into a film.”

Adapting a screenplay in 1987, Cocks & Scorsese had a first draft in three weeks. With the project set up at Fox, Scorsese planned to direct The Age of Innocence as soon as he completed GoodFellas. But when Fox studio chairman Joe Roth weighed the commercial risk of an Edith Wharton novel against Scorsese’s $32 million budget – as well as the director’s unwillingness to reduce his fee – The Age of Innocence was thrown into turnaround. Scorsese was drafted into directing Cape Fear for Steven Spielberg, but even after that movie became a blockbuster, Universal considered The Age of Innocence too rich for its taste as well. Mark Canton, chairman of Columbia/TriStar, was eager to forge a relationship with Scorsese, who critics had crowned “the greatest living American director.” Columbia agreed to finance the film.

Interviewed by the New York Times in 2007, Daniel Day-Lewis said of Martin Scorsese. “He is a mighty man, and when he asks you to do something, you want to do it. I was struggling to escape from English drawing rooms, but because of Martin, I accepted the role in The Age of Innocence.” When Scorsese found out that it had been Michelle Pfeiffer in Married to the Mob, as well as Scarface, he cast the versatile actress opposite Day-Lewis. Pfeiffer recalled, “What’s most universal and timeless about the novel and the film is what they have to say about the charades people play, the masks people wear for the sake of what’s socially acceptable. That’s still going strong. And when you see someone’s whole life guided by those standards, it touches a chord. You ask yourself: Will I wind up like Newland Archer? Could I make those sacrifices without becoming bitter?”

By the time The Age of Innocence went before the cameras in March 1992, Scorsese’s visual research consultant – Robin Standefer – had spent two and a half years studying New York society of the 1870s. Her work with the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and Edith Wharton scholars was so meticulous that Standefer discovered Wharton had misnamed a Bougeureau painting in her novel. A dozen other consultants were devoted to food, decorative arts, etiquette. With its three-story brownstones, the Victorian city of Troy, New York - located on the east bank of the Hudson River across from Albany – stood in for 19th century Manhattan. The opera sequence was filmed over a five-day period inside the Philadelphia Academy of Music, while outside, the streets were covered with soil, as New York had no paved streets in the 1870s.

Accustomed to having a year to cut his films, when The Age of Innocence wrapped in June 1992, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker were initially given only five months to have the film ready for Christmas. Then Scorsese’s 79-year-old father Charles – who had played bit roles in many of his son’s films - fell seriously ill. The studio decided against hurrying the greatest living American director. Producer Barbara De Fina recalled, “All the fine cutting and shaping would have suffered, the down-to-the-frame timing that makes it a Scorsese movie. Marty also likes to cut his scenes to the music, not lay in the score afterward.” Adding $2 million to its production costs, Columbia was confident that they were positioning the film for Academy Awards consideration in ‘93, with industry observers predicting a Best Actress win for Michelle Pfeiffer.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival August 1993, The Age of Innocence opened in the United States and Canada in limited release the following month. The critical praise was faint. Rita Kempley, the Washington Post: “Though lovely to behold, this film isn’t meant to send you home with a song in your heart.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “An extraordinarily sumptuous piece of filmmaking, The Age of Innocence represents an impeccably faithful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic novel, which is both a blessing and a bit of a curse.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: “As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton’s tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it’s a noble failure.”

Scorsese had been compelled by Mark Canton to cut the film from 165 minutes down to 139 minutes after test screenings had not gone well, but audiences still ignored the film. The New York Times cited an unnamed prominent theater exhibitor as saying, “It’s a coast picture, a specialized picture that does best on the East Coast and the West Coast but doesn’t hit in the heartland. The women seemed to like it, but it didn’t grab the men at all. A good picture, but not mainstream.” The Age of Innocence grossed $32.2 million in the United States. Nominated for five Academy Awards - including Winona Ryder for Best Supporting Actress - only Gabriella Pescucci (Best Costume Design) took home a statue. Michelle Pfeiffer wasn’t even nominated.

Opinion
In 1975, Stanley Kubrick turned the heads of critics and moviegoers into a question mark over his decision to turn a less than visionary novel by William Makepeace Thackeray titled Barry Lyndon into a film. The handcrafted costume epic starring Ryan O’Neal turned out to be the motion picture equivalent of an 18th century impressionist painting. It’s also the picture that Martin Scorsese routinely cites as his favorite of Kubrick’s. Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a sister planet to Barry Lyndon in the universe of pioneering visual achievements. It majestically interprets the language, social networks and descriptive flow of a Victorian Era novel, while boasting actors and production techniques that make Kubrick’s film look like hobby moviemaking.

With GoodFellas and Cape Fear preceding it, The Age of Innocence represents the greatest living American director at the peak of his creativity as a visual storyteller. So lavish in pictorial detail – Dante Ferretti would also design the sets for Casino and Gangs of New York - and somewhat impenetrable when it comes to the characters, their social positions and agendas, few films demand the attention that this one does. On repeated viewings, the passion between Wharton’s exiled lovers and the tenacity of those seeking to keep them apart is much easier to distill. It emerges as one of the superior big screen romances of recent years. Michael Ballhaus handled the cinematography and though the film is a visual embarrassment of riches, Elmer Bernstein composed a vibrant musical score to match.

© Joe Valdez