Somehow, I made it through most of the last 30 years without ever seeing The Age of Innocence1, Martin Scorcese’s film about repressed love in late 1800s New York. I finally caught it on the Criterion Channel service during the pre-vax days of the pandemic, was smitten, read Edith Wharton’s novel and finally received the DVD as a birthday gift this year. It’s a gorgeously decorated, rigorously composed movie. I love it.
And also, I’m not sure it’s the movie we think it is.
I think — maybe — it’s a movie about an obsessed stalker and a woman who ultimately has to flee to Europe to get away from him.
That’s not the popular reading of Innocence, I realize, nor how it was marketed to audiences originally. (If you’re not familiar with either, here’s a synopsis.) In the trailer, it comes across as an Americanized version of Jane Austen, all fancy dresses and rigid, oppressive conformity to rules we’ve long since dispensed with. There is some of that, to be sure.
And certainly that’s how critics saw the movie when it came out. Here’s Roger Ebert:
By the end, we realize these people have all the same emotions, passions, fears and desires that we do. It is simply that they value them more highly, and are less careless with them, and do not in the cause of self-indulgence choose a moment's pleasure over a lifetime's exquisite and romantic regret.
What I didn’t realize on the first viewing, until I read the book, is that Newland Archer — played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the movie — isn’t quite a doomed lover, no Heathcliff on the moors. Instead, he’s a callow if well-educated young man, overly confident of his free thinking ways, too easily contemptuous of others, a bit of a hypocrite. (The Narrator:2 “Archer enjoyed such challenges to convention. He questioned conformity in private; but, in public, he upheld family and tradition.”)
He thinks his wife, May, dim and unadventurous; it becomes clear by the end of the tale that she’s smart and clever enough to have orchestrated Newland’s loyalty against his will. And Newland’s obsession with Madame Olenska (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) isn’t really about her. “How little they knew of each other, after all!” Wharton writes. Instead, his pursuit of Ellen Olenska is about his idea of her and what she represents — a sort of bohemian freedom that takes on erotic qualities for him. That’s who he could be, if not for the scheming tyranny of New York society. This woman could transform him!
As for Olenska, well, she’s seen some shit.
Ellen Olenska: Don't make love to me. Too many people have done that.
She’s a woman who has been pursued by a thousand men, painted by nine others, and possessed by one — a faithless Polish husband — unworthy of her. It’s easy enough to read Ellen’s line here and think that Newland is different. But is he really? Yes, this scene gives gives us the makeout scene that adorned a thousand movie posters, but … to a great degree, Ellen spends her time here describing the sacrifice she’s made for Newland and May’s marriage.
Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a woman who entirely wants Newland to pursue her.
And “pursuit” is a word we can use literally. Ellen goes to a vacation home in the country; Newland follows to see her. Ellen goes to Boston; Newland follows again. And when Ellen goes to Washington D.C., Newland offers a flimsy excuse to his wife to follow once again — only to be interrupted by a mutual relative’s health problem.
Consider how this dialogue would be no different if it was in a horror movie about a stalker:
Ellen Olenska: I knew you'd come.
Newland Archer: That shows you wanted me to.
In the end, Newland is outmaneuvered by the women in his life — Ellen flees back to Europe, while May reveals that she is pregnant, effectively putting an end to his schemes. And it’s only decades later that he begins to realize that he underestimated May … and decides, ultimately, to leave Ellen alone.
Ebert:
…the last scene of the film, which pulls everything together, is almost unbearably poignant because it reveals that the man was not the only one with feelings - that others sacrificed for him, that his deepest tragedy was not what he lost, but what he never realized he had.
It’s only in that moment — when he considers that May’s inner life was bigger than he realized, that Ellen’s life life is too, that they are fully people too — that he gives up the self-delusion and obsession. A little bit of it, anyway. He does the only right thing that’s left: He walks away.
Spoilers coming, obviously, although it’s been 29 years since the movie and more than a century since the book. It’s your own damn fault if something gets discussed here that you didn’t want to find out.
Among the movie’s pleasures: Joanne Woodward’s droll delivery of Edith Wharton’s prose. This may be the best-narrated movie ever.