913 The Age of Innocence

[hearthesilence]

... Woodward's performance is wonderful, but the narration is also valuable for preserving Wharton's great prose - IIRC that was the main reason for Truffaut's decision to use narration in Jules and Jim. Interesting to me because GoodFellas's narration was reportedly inspired by Jules and Jim and yet it was employed in a different way for that film.

Woodward's narration in The Age of Innocence certainly preserves the prose of the book in the same way Welles' narration does in Ambersons. Truffaut may have wanted to achieve the same ends with Jules and Jim, but it's hard to see a through line from Truffaut's film to Goodfellas. The most obvious dissimilarity is the Goodfellas narration is in first person whereas Jules and Jim, like the other two films I mentioned, is in third person. Not a lot in common between the two approaches unless Scorsese was responding to the way the narration in Jules and Jim breathlessly recounts small, almost inconsequential, details which add up to create a more fleshed-out milieu for the subsequent action. That detached, almost documentary-like narration Truffaut uses can be seen directly imitated in the film Amélie (2001) and, to a slightly lesser extent, in Magnolia (1999).

Absolutely. Reportedly, narration was something Scorsese had been hoping to use one day because he loved it so much in Jules and Jim, so I guess he simply liked the possibilities of using narration. (He did manage to use a little bit in Mean Streets, but IIRC it's only those two brief moments with Harvey Keitel early on - may be a third I'm forgetting, but it's not a lot.) I may have learned this from the bonus features for GoodFellas, it's been too long to pinpoint where, but it always stuck out because as you said, the use of narration is completely different in both cases - the only superficial resemblance is the extensive use of it, covering a large majority of both films, and as you mentioned the way they weave in small and superficially inconsequential details. But who gets to narrate/their relation to the story itself, all different.

[FrauBlucher]

Woodward's narration is one of the finest use of voiceover in film. The film wouldn't be the same without it. Which is always the question about voiceovers.