The deliberate slowness of the camera as it moves throughout scenes; the way characters react to one another with little more than glances and smiles and polite gestures who imply much more than what they say; the theme of a rigid society and the woman who unknowingly disrupts it with her "scandalous" conduct; the story of a repressed love affair: this is not the stuff that makes Martin Scorcese films as he's more known as a filmmaker of aggressive, extremely violent films depicting mainly Italian-Americans in a gritty New York City. However, while the story is upper-crust WASP, the visual imprints are his, and the violence is completely internal, emotional, equally if not more devastating.
Contemplative, but no less involving, is the core of this movie's visual attitude. With so much subtext just simmering underneath the events told in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, any other approach would have reduced the impact that its denouement reveals. Scorcese uses a tremendous amount of visual tricks to emphasize what or whom we should look at: spotlighting Pfeiffer and Day-Lewis as they enjoy a quiet conversation during the intermission in a play; overlapping series of fleeting images from snippets of correspondence between characters; slowing the action down for about five seconds in a key scene (when Pfeiffer gets up from her seat, crosses a room full of guests to go talk to Day-Lewis as Woodward narrates "It was not the custom for a lady to get up ... and talk to another man."). His technique forces us to really watch the story, to look for details, overt and covert, since like the opening montage of roses in bloom at the beginning of the credits, this is a movie of deep contemplation -- not because of the lush images, but because of the subtle game of tradition which is being played behind the curtains, just out of the camera's view. Nothing is what it seems, and in the exceptional case of Winona Ryder's incredibly sly portrayal of May Welland, that becomes true: she knows much more than her character reveals, and when she does so, it's only with a loving glance. She is aware of her husband's attraction to Ellen Olenska, and even casually feeds him into it, only to chain him to her at the end when all is revealed and nothing can be done. And this is what makes the movie so ultimately tragic and emotionally jarring: that true love is consciously allowed to be crushed in lieu of family tradition, which is the overwhelming hypocrisy of the people inhabiting Edith Wharton's timeless novel.
Contemplative, but no less involving, is the core of this movie's visual attitude. With so much subtext just simmering underneath the events told in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, any other approach would have reduced the impact that its denouement reveals. Scorcese uses a tremendous amount of visual tricks to emphasize what or whom we should look at: spotlighting Pfeiffer and Day-Lewis as they enjoy a quiet conversation during the intermission in a play; overlapping series of fleeting images from snippets of correspondence between characters; slowing the action down for about five seconds in a key scene (when Pfeiffer gets up from her seat, crosses a room full of guests to go talk to Day-Lewis as Woodward narrates "It was not the custom for a lady to get up ... and talk to another man."). His technique forces us to really watch the story, to look for details, overt and covert, since like the opening montage of roses in bloom at the beginning of the credits, this is a movie of deep contemplation -- not because of the lush images, but because of the subtle game of tradition which is being played behind the curtains, just out of the camera's view. Nothing is what it seems, and in the exceptional case of Winona Ryder's incredibly sly portrayal of May Welland, that becomes true: she knows much more than her character reveals, and when she does so, it's only with a loving glance. She is aware of her husband's attraction to Ellen Olenska, and even casually feeds him into it, only to chain him to her at the end when all is revealed and nothing can be done. And this is what makes the movie so ultimately tragic and emotionally jarring: that true love is consciously allowed to be crushed in lieu of family tradition, which is the overwhelming hypocrisy of the people inhabiting Edith Wharton's timeless novel.