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.
