THE AGE OF INNOCENCE Directed by Martin Scorsese Written by Jay Cocks and Scorsese With Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, Stuart Wilson, Miriam Margolyes, Geraldine Chaplin, Mary Beth Hurt, and Norman Lloyd.
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Perhaps the tribalism of the New York families is what attracted Scorsese’s interest—a thematic concern that supposedly makes this film the blood brother (if not the blood sister) of Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas. That, at any rate, is cowriter Jay Cocks’s suggestion as to why he brought this novel to Scorsese’s attention. But even if one accepts the loose connection between Wharton and Scorsese as ethnographers of their different tribes, that doesn’t mean that either one is qualified to comment on the other’s territory. If Wharton were alive and working today as a filmmaker, would Cocks have suggested she make a movie about macho rituals among working-class Italian Americans?
Scorsese’s street-smart, Little Italy origins are no disgrace; they simply point his perceptions in a certain direction. But trying to focus on Wharton’s world inevitably places him in the role of a drooling paisan with his nose pressed against the window. It’s one thing for Wharton, in the midst of a 362-page novel, to describe a dinner that Newland Archer, the lawyer hero, shares with his employer: “after a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young broiled turkey with corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise.” But it’s quite another for Scorsese, in a 133-minute movie, to highlight each of these items in a separate decorously lit and framed shot. The novel is already consumerist, to be sure—Wharton’s method of mainstreaming Henry James is very much a matter of simplifying the style and amplifying the set decoration—but what figures as a fleeting aside in her prose becomes a TV ad for Gourmet magazine in the movie.
To some extent this subtext in the novel indicts Archer, implying that his failure to act on his romantic impulses—to have an affair with Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), the married cousin of his fiancee (and later wife) May Welland (Winona Ryder)—is as much a failure of nerve and backbone as it is a consequence of societal pressures. As Edmund Wilson (who incidentally regarded The Age of Innocence as a novel written on the very cusp of Wharton’s decline) put it in 1947, reviewing an early Wharton biography: “The male type which most conspicuously recurs in her novels is the cultivated intelligent man who cannot bear to offend social convention, the reformer who gets bribed without knowing it in marrying a rich wife, the family man who falls in love with someone more exciting than his wife but doesn’t have the courage of his passion; and the treatment of these characters by the author, though outwardly sympathetic, is always well chilled with an irony that has an undercurrent of scorn.”
