Gorgeously rich and fluent, visually breathtaking and exquisitely refined, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation (with screenwriter Jay Cocks) of the 1920 novel by Edith Wharton is now re-released for its 30th anniversary and looks even more magnificent than ever. It is a tragedy of manners set in New York society’s own belle époque of the 1870s, an age, not of innocence, but concealed guilt.
Newland Archer, played with amazing suavity by Daniel Day-Lewis, is a handsome, wealthy lawyer, about to make a socially brilliant marriage to the delicate, guileless and yet somehow knowing May (Winona Ryder). But as a lawyer and now family friend, Archer agrees to help May’s cousin Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of a lifetime), an exotically beautiful and unconventional woman who has effectively escaped back to America after a disastrous marriage to a cruel Polish count; she has perhaps been guilty of later indiscretions of her own in Europe before arriving in the United States. New York’s high society is uneasy at the scandal but just about able to accept Ellen on account of her blueblood American antecedents, and also as the victim of a foreigner’s cruelty.
But it is Newland’s task to persuade Ellen not to get divorced, to sacrifice her freedom to save her protectors the embarrassment of a public court proceeding. But he falls deeply in love with this passionate, intelligent woman whose instinct is to reject the hypocrisy that Newland now apparently wants to normalise in her life: the hypocrisy of being some rich man’s mistress – or in fact Newland’s mistress, if he will not give up his marriage.
The Age of Innocence is a film to compare with the period dramas of Hollywood’s golden age, such as Wyler’s The Heiress (based on Henry James) or Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, or to something by the European masters: Max Ophüls’ The Earrings of Madame De… or Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. When Winona Ryder’s May elegantly wins an archery contest, I like to think that Scorsese had in his mind an echo of Powell and Pressburger, whose production company was famously named the Archers, or Valerie Hobson’s archery scenes in Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that Scorsese found something lush in Wharton that Terence Davies didn’t, or not quite, in his more austere-seeming movie version of her novel The House of Mirth.)
Day-Lewis never looked more physically beautiful than in this film: beautifully tailored at all times and with a quiet voice, he appears to murmur, like a furtive lover or a priest in the confessional. He has the head of a Roman emperor, or would have, if Roman emperors looked this good. Pfeiffer’s exuberant yet shrewdly contained performance matches his.
Scorsese contrives a wonderful first meeting between the two of them. In the box at the opera, Ellen pertly gives Newland her hand to kiss: a misjudged Old Europe gesture, as Newland tactfully gives her to understand when he merely takes her fingers. And later, to show she has grasped this, Ellen offers him a frank, democratic handshake with a grin; he responds in kind and we can pretty well see them fall in love right then and there. It is her creepy suitor Julius Beaufort (Stuart Wilson) who still goes in for hand-kissing.
There is an alpha supporting cast, including Sîan Phillips as Newland’s mother, Richard E Grant as waspish gossip and man-about-town Larry Lefferts, and Joanne Woodward as the narrator. Miriam Margolyes had her finest hour in the movies with her scene-stealing turn as May and Ellen’s cantankerous, wealthy grandmother Mrs Mingott, like someone from Dickens or Louisa May Alcott.
So Newland’s ordeal continues, hardly able to decide if there is moral courage and integrity in not simply running off with Ellen; it is, after all, the fact of May’s pregnancy which convinces them that staying is the right thing. Or is it profound cowardice? And Scorsese asks us a searing question: all those social norms, rules and conventions, the white tie dinners and gala evenings… did they crush Newland and Ellen’s love? Or did they, on the contrary, make this love possible? Did these sterile regulations endow Ellen with the outsider glamour that first entranced Newland? And was it the very dreamy impossibility of an adventure with Ellen which allowed them both to indulge the dangerous flirting which took them past the point of no return before they realised it? The production design by Dante Ferretti, costumes by Gabriella Pescucci, cinematography by Michael Ballhaus and editing by Thelma Schoonmaker are all superb. The Age of Innocence is a luxurious work of art.
• The Age of Innocence is released on 17 March in cinemas.
• This article was amended on 17 March 2023 to correct a misspelling of Miriam Margolyes’ surname.
