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FANCY FEAST
From the start, with Victorian calligraphy as background for the blooming flowers during the credits, to the first scenes inside an opera house wherein Gounod's Faust is being staged, to the next set of views touring a plush 1870s New York mansion overflowing with velvet, art and stuffed mannequins as people, viewers still wonder: Can this really be a Martin Scorsese picture? Based on Edith Wharton's 1921 Pulitzer prize-winning novel about hypocritical American upper-class values, The Age of Innocence might seem the atmospheric product of Ivory and Merchant. Hard to believe but Scorsese equals them: made in honor of one of his favorite movies The Heiress, and designed by Dante Ferretti, The Age of Innocence looks like a gilded age vision by Luchino Visconti or John De Cuir, and there's undeniable resemblance to Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Like that feast, Scorsese's is equally fancy and rich in detail—everything's splashed as layouts from Architectural Digest and Gourmet—and you could get woozy and have to hit the smelling salts. The only touch of modernity that Scorsese risks is allowing the unfulfilled love between Wharton's soon-to-be-married Newland Archer and the rumored-to-be-loose Countess Ellen Olenska to anger us. This isn't a movie only about stifling customs of denial or high society poison, it's also about our hypocrisy over values—relinquishing ourselves to others' unearned demands of imperatives we want but fear to reject. Scorsese picked the right Wharton material as his first foray into the genre of American period piece: his two lovers are ruled by a class snobbery not too distant from the sociopaths and goons who rule over victims in his charged-up contemporary Americana. The central difference is that there are no bloody corpses as pornography, though the lavish spreads in The Age of Innocence are rather porno-ish in their arbitrariness. Yet that's part of Wharton's appeal: as much as she's criticizing the social dictums by which her characters are forced to live, she's trapped them in orgies of addictive lushness. (And Wharton herself more than most: she was born into and lived the exceedingly pampered life of high social class New York. Like Mark Twain before her and F. Scott Fitzgerald after, she did much of her writing in the comfort of her bed. Once, when she discovered that a hotel room bed didn't face the light, she flew into a “fit of hysterics.” Both protégé of and traveling companion to Henry James, the most obvious influence on her as a writer, she picked up the exactitude of his prose style, as well as interlacing her narratives with biting commentary, just as he did in The Bostonians, the seminal work which inspired The Age of Innocence . Born in France and the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize and receive an honorary degree from Yale, Wharton would perform readings, often at her chateau in Hyeres, of her works-in-progress in front of James and French novelist Paul Bourget, authors specializing in the psychological.) Neither the book nor movie is a psycho study of romantic doom—they're about locking out or preventing people from achieving personal happiness. Scorsese's gamble is not to give in to what today's movie audience longs for—the coming together of Countess Olenska and Newland Archer. That's why the conclusion gets to us despite being prepared for it: we feel the pain in what the two lovers are forced not to do—that for us there's no shame in flaunting disregard of others' social conspiracies. In two fine scenes, coming at a bon voyage dinner and at the end, Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland forces us to grieve for him—for his own lack of courage. But Day-Lewis isn't quite suited for this story. No one would call him less than adequate, yet he's mostly unaffecting, disassembled—parts of him are weak, prissy and always it seems verging on tears; parts of him disbelievingly mansion-sized self-assured. Day-Lewis can be many types because he's one of few thin actors who has the uncanny ability to transmogrify, to physically evolve into character. But endlessly posing here, alternately a still life of agony or insufferable smoothie, he's too self-satisfied with his portraiture. The way in which Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus defer to him—and it starts with the very first shot of him—confirms that his “artistry” is in being the movies' most accomplished con. (David Strathairn my choice for Newland, if Gov. Mark Sanford wouldn't be available.) If Day-Lewis wallows too much, Pfeiffer keeps her wits about her and does what she didn't quite succeed in Dangerous Liaisons—get us to believe she belongs in antique melodrama. Her voice is key, I think: it has that slight pitchedness that happens to women of leisure, women who resign, though may not privately accept, that they're chattel to be displayed as pretty possessions. Olenska has bits of Wharton in her, in that the novelist was likewise strapped by a loveless marriage, and she's homage to one of James' leading ladies in The Bostonians—Verena, the young red-haired feminist spitfire. But Pfeiffer borrows from neither: she's her own portrait of a woman accepting defeat by convention and patronage. A character built by mystery, there's little to gauge her inner-feelings about the events she's stoically forced into acquiescence. (Only once does the performance lose us: in a living room, she's smoking but the cigarette doesn't appear to be lit and when she exhales, no smoke comes out.) Out of Dickens and Aunt Pittypat from GWTW, Miriam Margolyes gives the audience its best laughs as moneybags Mrs. Manson Mingott. Chubby in face, Mary Beth Hurt is nearly unrecognizable as Mrs. Beaufort. As her cad of a husband, Stuart Wilson is doing a tribute to Rod Steiger's Komarovsky from Doctor Zhivago. And there's repellent Winona Ryder as breathless May pulling off a coup de theatre as pinnacle of despised entrapment. In Maugham, biographer Ted Morgan writes Somerset “was exasperated by the rightness and exactness of everything Wharton said.” He was particularly out of joint by her usage of “no,” for he “had never heard a more frigid syllable of disapproval.” Maugham snarled, “Her manner was that of a woman to whom a man has made proposals offensive to her modesty, but which good breeding tells her it will be more dignified to ignore than to make a scene about.” The essence of Wharton as social prisoner and writer: while arguably for the expression of love and sex, she was likely poisoned by her mother's frigidity, which might have helped make her the anti-feminist she appeared to be, in that she opposed education of women for high professions, didn't exercise her right to vote, nor invited other women to social parties she threw. And she may have been further spoiled by her supposed love affair with bisexual Morton Fullerton. (A recent biographer suggests Wharton was both homophobic and anti-Semitic, and disapproved of Joyce and Lawrence; one wonders if she was aware of James' predilections.) This Victorian vengeance in her writing is regretful and sad—she's compulsive about punishing her fictional lovers. (She punished them in Ethan Frome, too.) Scorsese caught her envenom, but he didn't do it alone: Time critic Jay Cocks ferreted out Wharton's upbraidings and helped shape them into a screenplay dealing with denied passions that at the same time exalts the power of words. It's thrilling to not only hear the text captured with this much respect, but to also see art come to life—Georges Seurat's “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and winter scenes by Richard Hartmann and Childe Hassam. And there's a happy marriage of editing and text: Thelma Schoonmaker (whose name is plastered as an advertisement within the movie) lays on montages of messages and invitations reminding us of the long-ago art of personal writing. The Age of Innocence even serves up hors d'oeuvres—Wharton's running commentary is deliciously voiced over by Joanne Woodward as parenthetical gossip whispered for our ears only. Text COPYRIGHT © 2008 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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