The Age of Innocence

The Scene — Screen

Martin Scorsese has said The Age of Innocence is the most violent film he ever made, and there is not a single act of violence in it. The cruelty is all in the manners — in the smiles, the dinner invitations, the perfectly polite sentences that close a life like a trap.

Adapted from Edith Wharton’s novel and released in 1993, the film moves through the drawing rooms of 1870s New York high society. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is engaged to the proper, conventional May Welland (Winona Ryder) when he meets her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) — unconventional, separated from her husband, and the first person who has ever made Archer’s settled future feel like a cage.

WHAT IT GETS RIGHT

It understands that a closed society does not need to raise its voice to destroy you. Everyone in Archer’s world knows about his feeling for Ellen. Nobody mentions it. Instead they manage it — with a seating plan, a sympathetic word, a farewell dinner thrown with such warmth that Archer only realizes much later he was being quietly, permanently put in his place. The kindness is the weapon.

Scorsese shoots it like a man documenting a vanished tribe — the food, the flowers, the calling cards, the rules — because the rules are the real subject. Day-Lewis plays a man slowly understanding that his life has been decided for him by people too well-mannered to ever say so.

THE LIFE NOT LIVED

What lingers is the ending — an older Archer, given at last a free and easy chance at the love he gave up, and choosing not to climb the stairs. It is the saddest kind of restraint: not the love denied by circumstance, but the love a man can no longer quite imagine himself living. A quiet, devastating film about the cost of belonging.

Watch it when you can sit with something elegant and merciless. There is no blood in it, and it cuts deeper than most films that are full of it.

Make an evening of it with our Date Night watchlist: Films of Old New York.

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POUR — Something old and formal. A sherry, a fine red, a cold martini.

MOOD — Elegant. Merciless. Mannered to the bone.

Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.