One rainy Sunday way back in the 1990s, a bunch of hungover blokes decided to stop lazing around on sofas and get a video out. Something by Martin Scorsese maybe; that was the only advice given to the person who went to the shop. We wanted macho men shooting each other in the face. And we ended up with 19th-century aristocrats wondering whether to buy each other flowers. But it didn’t really matter. There are gangsters in The Age of Innocence. It’s just that they’re all wearing top hats.
They may be, deep down, as cold-hearted and full of malice as any sidewalk hustler, but the upper-class New Yorkers in Scorsese’s magnificently faithful adaptation of Edith Wharton‘s classic tale of doomed love sure know what fork to use at the table. And what tables, what food, what finery, what a feast for the eyes. Everything in this film is dressed up to the nines, from the swan-necked women with their past-the-elbow gloves to the walls decked with masterpiece after masterpiece. A Turner seascape here, a sumptuous Sargent there: 200 ravishing copies in all, knocked up in just two months for Scorsese by a New York firm that was paid $200,000 and didn’t get a credit. The Return of Spring, an infamous and colossal nude by Bouguereau, makes an early appearance in a crimson drawing room in the house of Julius Beaufort, a brash banker who has his very own ballroom; it’s only used once a year, for an event Beaufort is too modest to attend. The film’s peripheries are full of such fabulously overblown characters.
But nothing in The Age of Innocence looks finer than Michelle Pfeiffer, sweeping up staircases as the vivacious and unconventional Countess Ellen Olenska, who has returned from Europe having fled her womanising husband. She wants a divorce but the count is threatening to divulge the contents of an apparently compromising letter. Although Ellen is unafraid, the mere hint of scandal drives high-society New York to conspire against her. She must go back or be cut off – not least because she is also suspected of having commenced an affair with our hero, Newland Archer, a lawyer played with a winning mixture of stiffness and passion by Daniel Day-Lewis. Newland is engaged to Ellen’s dull cousin May Welland, chillingly portrayed by Winona Ryder as an ingenue on top but a schemer underneath.
May, at the heart of the conspiracy against Ellen, uses her own pregnancy to extinguish her cousin’s hopes. Yet tragically, in a scene that’s as erotic as any I’ve ever seen, virtually all Newland and Ellen actually manage to do is nuzzle each other like cats in the back of a carriage, with Newland succeeding in tenderly slipping off one of her gloves.
Why do I love it so much? I love the things they say to each other. “You know painters then?” says Ellen. “You exist in their milieu?” I love the way Newland, in despair, is unable to find his customary comfort in his shipment of books from London; we see him among them, rubbing his face with one. I love the way vast chunks of Wharton’s luminous prose are employed as narration, languidly intoned by Joanne Woodward: “They all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world. The real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.” Later, when Ellen reappears a few years after Newland marries May, the voiceover declares: “The past had come again into the present, as in those newly discovered caverns in Tuscany where children had lit bunches of straw and seen old images staring from the wall.” That’s quite a line to deliver to a roomful of hungover blokes.
I love all those close-ups of fires blazing when the mood gets frosty. I love the lavish operas they attend, using the glasses to spy on each other. I love Elmer Bernstein’s score, its ghostly waltzes and the way it seems to inspire the birds to soar upwards in the final heartbreaking scene in Paris, Wharton’s adopted home. I love the fact that it’s the women who drive all the big events, while the men stand around in a fug of cigar smoke. I love the scene where 1,000 men in bowler hats walk down a street in slow motion, like a Manet painting brought to life. And I love the film’s often brutal messages: love doesn’t conquer all; we are, for all our finery, a savage species; we persecute outsiders to feel part of the pack; and there’s no baddie like a toff.
But most of all I love The Age of Innocence for two scenes, one pure Wharton, the other pure Scorsese. In the first, midway through, Newland goes searching for Ellen and spies her off in the distance, by a lighthouse at the end of a pier beneath a blood-red sunset. A yacht is sailing by on a shimmering sea. It is a scene awash with light and hope and longing. If she looks round before the ship passes the lighthouse, Newland thinks to himself, I will go to her, I will be with her whatever the cost. She doesn’t.
The second scene comes at the end in Paris. Newland is an old man, his wife long dead and Ellen long gone; neither have remarried. His son Ted, aware of his father’s secret, has dragged him to Ellen’s flat. She is waiting for them up there on the top floor, but Newland won’t budge from his bench, sending Ted up instead. Before he walks slowly back to his hotel, bent forward as if by his heavy heart, Newland looks up and sees a window being closed. As it catches the sun, he lifts his face to the light and suddenly – courtesy of a Scorsese masterstroke – he is back on that pier at sunset and Ellen is turning towards him, her face full of light and hope and longing.
That scene is Scorsese’s great gift to Wharton, a writer who punishes her characters for not following their hearts, letting the colour bleed out of their lives. Lift your face to the light, The Age of Innocence implores, and see the one you love turn towards you.
