The Age of Innocence (Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Daniel Day Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder)

MARTIN Scorsese is not a director one associates with innocence or old world values. The idea of him adapting an Edith Wharton novel is akin to Merchant Ivory remaking Reservoir Dogs, where the amount of blood wouldn’t matter so much as the shade. The Age of Innocence is certainly the first Scorsese film without so much as an expletive, unless you count “tut” and “tsk” as words not to be spoken in front of children.

And the subject matter hardly seems promising: like Merchant Ivory’s own recent Remains of the Day it is a story of unrequited love, a tale of inaction and good manners from the director of Cape Fear and Goodfellas. The result is such a triumph that it not only reinvents and reinvigorates the director (who, after Cape Fear might have seemed on the verge of self parody) but drags the costume drama back out of the tea room and into the turbulent world of modern cinema.

Which is not to suggest there is no tea, or indeed china, in The Age of Innocence. The film is overflowing with the stuff, warm tea and polite conversation. There are so many lavish dinners one begins to wonder how Daniel Day Lewis manages to remain so thin and not transform himself, Raging Bull style, into an obese lump by the end of the movie. And there are beautifully designed drawing rooms and opulent ballrooms and fabulous costumes and all the usual trappings of the period movie. But Scorsese brings an American flair to this most English of genres. As befits such extravagance, his sets and furnishings are not shot with polite restraint, or tip-toed around. The details are piled high, sometimes literally, with dazzling montages in which dinner courses flicker and change before our eyes, until we are swamped in the luxury of wealthy New York society circa 1870. Using all the devices of modern cinema (long steadicam tracks, freeze frames, slow motion, high speed shots, fast edits, explosions of impressionistic colour) and a few more besides (at an opera the camera follows the sweep of a pair of opera glasses across the audience with a radiant stroboscopic pan) Scorsese makes the past vivid and tangible, without making the mistake of updating it or reinterpreting it according to contemporary tastes.

Which is not to suggest there are no contemporary parallels. The Age of Innocence is a love story, unusual territory for this most masculine (as opposed to macho) of directors, but it is framed and defined by the rules of a New York society that may be of a different class and even a century apart from the New York Mafia that provide the background to Mean Streets and Goodfellas yet is similarly strict and all pervasive, operating by near invisible codes that must not be transgressed. Like Mean Streets (and much of the director’s subsequent work) The Age of Innocence concerns itself with the fate of outsiders pitted against restrictive society, and in a curious way, the bloodletting of the Mafia may seem more honest than the circuitous, underhand manipulations of these upstanding members of 19th century high society.

Scorsese is not a director one would readily associate with innocence and despite the title, this is not so much a saga of innocence as hypocrisy. It focuses on Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis), engaged to May Welland (Winona Ryder) in a perfect society match, but whose gradually overwhelming passion for dissolute and disgraced countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) poses a threat to his own sense of social decorum and that of his contemporaries. Newland is a man who wants to do the right thing, but cannot decide what the right thing is: to follow his passionate instinct or to obey the rules of the world he belongs to, by birth and by upbringing. It is a tale of prevarication and prognostication, and Day Lewis is just the man to bring this inaction hero to life, subtly registering his interior struggle while Scorsese dramatises it, visually enlarging his star’s emotions with explosions of colour and the minutest shift of sound, speed and focus.

It could be a cinematic essay in passion, although it is an oddly one-sided affair. Michelle Pfeiffer is a technically fine actress, yet there is something glacial about her, a distance in her gaze that makes her seem iconic rather than flesh and blood. Scorsese has never been entirely comfortable with women or sexuality, and by depicting the countess almost as an object to be admired, Archer’s love for her takes on elements of the fetishistic. It is worth noting that the most passionate embrace takes place between Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer’s shoe. It is hard to tell whether this is a subtle comment on man’s inability to know women, or simply a result of Scorsese’s own inadequacy in that department. For while a modern audience, used to the idea of an individual’s freedom to follow his or her heart’s desire, will take the side of the would-be lovers against a society that would condemn them, there is no more maturity displayed in this relationship than in the one that society deems correct for Newland.

Yet, perhaps because of this lack of maturity, this is a love story that constantly trembles with the passionate despair of infatuation, which Scorsese builds to an emotionally explosive climax in which nothing tangible happens. For perhaps the director’s real fascination with this story is not the affair but the cinematic challenge of creating a world where confrontation barely exists, where everything is done discreetly and by misdirection, by saying one thing and meaning another. Over two hours Scorsese illuminates and underlines this deceptiveness, until our admiration for the fine lifestyle he displays gives way to deep suspicion at the cost exacted for it. In a cinematic tour de force Scorsese depicts a polite dinner party that will leave audiences reeling with the power of its near invisible emotional violence.

By bringing the full force of his astonishing cinematic cannon to bear on this outwardly restrained costume drama, Scorsese succeeds in making a genuine drama out of a subtle emotional crisis. For all its etiquette, this glorious movie transforms the passive into the kinetic, and portrays the fear and loathing that can lurk beneath even the smoothest of surfaces.