The Age of Innocence
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Running time: 2hrs19 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Michelle Pfiefer and Daniel Day-Lewis star in The Age of Innocence
“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
It’s always strange to me when people in fiction behave as if fiction is barely a part of their lives. To give an easy example: it feels completely mad when people in a vampire movie have never heard of vampires. But creating characters who articulate too much of their media-savvy smarts is also a dangerous game. Over-egg the pudding and the writer cooks up a meta-fictional mess, too aware of itself as fiction to ever pull us into another world; it’s hard to fully suspend disbelief when someone keeps gesturing frantically at the wires holding the puppets upright.
The Age of Innocence (in both its novel and film forms) waltzes elegantly between and around these two problems, as it traces the romantic attraction between two characters, Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, both of whom are keenly aware of the contours of fiction and the ways that art differs from life. This awareness is part of what keeps them apart. Though they are deeply in love more or less before either of them has time to realise it, they can’t do much about it. They are paralysed, firstly by the inertia of their highly structured lives, but also by the sense that to love so keenly is something that only happens in fiction, and is therefore to be mistrusted, along with most other displays of strong emotion. In New York high society in the 1870s, strong feelings are barely believed to be real, and not to be acted upon. As Joanne Woodward’s narrator puts it in the film, “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”
Martin Scorsese’s visually stunning adaptation, one of the greatest of all page-to-screen adaptations, breathes a lovely, resonant life into Wharton’s precise characterisation. Michelle Pfeiffer’s luminous Ellen Olenska is a lady with a past, underscored by significant scenes in which she is dressed in vivid red, classic cinematic shorthand for a sexually independent woman that you may or may not be able to trust. Daniel Day-Lewis’ Newland Archer is a handsome, buttoned-up chap who we first encounter sitting peacefully in a darkened theatre, placidly respecting, at an appropriate remove, the heightened passions of an opera. Newland is rather thrown by Ellen in a number of ways. For one thing, she makes him laugh at boring parties, always one of the greatest gifts any human being can offer another, but evidently not something of which he has much experience.
He soon realises he has fallen for her, but finds it almost impossible to get over the feeling that this literal and figurative scarlet woman is bound to betray him. He doesn’t fully trust her, and he finds it even harder to fully trust his own feelings for her; it all feels more like a fiction than real life can possibly feel. As Wharton wrote, “scenes” (and this is a word with a double meaning applicable to both the building blocks of fiction and to emotional outbursts) are not meant to be part of his well-ordered life: “It was the old New York way...the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes’, except those who gave rise to them.”
But the damage, by that point, has been done. The second time we encounter Newland sitting in the darkened theatre, watching an opera, we see that he is overwhelmed by feeling; his newly awakened emotions have violated the boundaries between fiction and life for him. The veil separating the two has been torn, and he understands for the first time that characters in fiction only resonate because real people are indeed capable of behaving like people in novels.
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993) Written by Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese, based upon the novel by Edith Wharton | Shot by Michael Ballhaus | Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker
The Age of Innocence is currently on re-release in UK cinemas
