Critics reviews

Some of the strongest passages find Scorsese and the cinematographer Michael Ballhaus’s camera sweeping through immense rooms, inhaling opulence and character activity as Woodward coolly recites Wharton’s sentences dissecting the denizens. Through this analytical distancing, Scorsese achieves a Barry Lyndon–like sense of rueful detachment.

Scorsese’s momentous style is harnessed for a less masculine and more formalized approach. For me, The Age of Innocence is Scorsese’s opus. It’s his most emotional and most expressive movie, at least as wrenchingly personal as the films that made his name, finding power at its loudest in the eloquent silence of heartbreak.

Unlike those of many of Scorsese’s films, the verbal confrontations of The Age of Innocence aren’t followed by physical violence, which can clear the air for the characters and the audience, serving as a kind of emotional orgasm. Wharton created a world that thrives on innuendo and subtext, which Scorsese informs with his own neurotic maximalism.

In Wharton, the real action is internal, taking place within the consciousness of her protagonist, Newland Archer, a young man with every quality but the capacity to break free of stifling social norms. The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a study in frustration, a passionate love story in which the passion—the powerful mutual attraction of Newland and his scandal-clouded cousin Ellen—remains unrealizable.

The Age of Innocence is, obviously, gorgeous; before ever seeing it I heard anecdotes about the attention lavished on every detail. Utensils, dances, gowns: all are re-created and re-enacted lovingly. Perhaps this is the crux of the film: it plays as a re-enactment, while a great film should have the animation of life. There is something waxen and dull here—and I am not mistaking subtlety for tediousness. Scorsese simply tried to do something impossible: express an inability to express.

Despite its panorama of demure characters, The Age of Innocence stands as one of Scorsese's most visually dynamic productions, with iris-like spotlighting within the frame, bursts of color inspired by Black Narcissus and Rear Window, and the aforementioned prowl of the Beaufort estate uncannily echoing Ballhaus's legendary nightclub sequence from Goodfellas, as tuxedoed party guests nod approvingly at Newland one step ahead of the Steadicam.

Who better than Scorsese to depict these, the meanest streets of all? Only a native New Yorker could so artfully portray the stultifying proximity of illicit city romance. In the gossip-filled parlors of the van der Luydens or Archers, the slightest faux pas could have a disastrous effect on one's reputation. Cross the boss, south of Houston, and the shame is the same (if not a hair bloodier). Fifth Avenue, it seems, is not so far from Mulberry Street.

Strangely underappreciated upon its release, a masterwork by any measure, and easily one of the greatest movies Scorsese has ever directed... The Age of Innocence is as brutal a film as anything in Scorsese's filmography—and it is also just as kinetic. His camera is constantly in motion, insinuating itself between characters, panning, tilting, and tracking from faces to walls to plates of food to silverware to fine china.

The most underrated and underseen of Martin Scorsese's major works. Like Casino, it combines a chilly, melancholy tone with a playful and imaginative style; unmotivated close-ups, rapid dissolves, and dreamy dolly moves abound. Eccentric and opulent, The Age Of Innocence is one of the director's most visually dense works. It's packed with flowers, table settings, calling cards, and other assorted 19th-century bric-a-brac. Paintings and folding screens create frames within the frame.

Depending on your point of view, this is either one of Martin Scorsese's grandest failures or one of his boldest triumphs. Certainly, it was unexpected for Scorsese to adapt Edith Wharton's novel, set among the high society of 1870s New York. Wharton's style is as reserved as the director's is visceral, and Scorsese approaches the discrepancy as a challenge: How to translate such a literary work, which derives its force from its describing unexpressed emotion, into a wholly cinematic one?

The Beauforts' ball is a tour-de-force sequence, beginning with a wondrous layering of time-progressing shots; then the camera strolls through the halls and rooms of the house, discovering meeting groups, and finally soars high overhead to observe the geometric patterns made by the dancing couples. Color is used carefully, painted with a flat, slightly pressed texture, delicately recreating the texturing of the paintings Newland loves, but without walloping the eye with sheer prettiness.

[Raging Bull and GoodFellas] derived their power from a special tension, a contradiction between the profane, socially determined behaviour of Scorsese's anti-heroes, and the sacred themes and euphoric emotions to which their actions gave rise. The Age of Innocence profoundly alters this equation, for all the energy and rapture of the story is sublimated, and comes to suffuse bodies, events and objects in a trembling, fragile way.