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The Age of Innocence



No filmmaker captures the grandeur and energy of New York like Martin Scorsese. With this sumptuous romance, he meticulously adapted the work of another great New York artist, Edith Wharton, bringing to life her tragic novel of the cloistered world of Gilded Age Manhattan. The Age of Innocence tells the story of Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose engagement to an innocent socialite (Winona Ryder) binds him to the codes and rituals of his upbringing. But when her cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives in town on a wave of scandal after separating from her husband, she ignites passions in Newland he never knew existed. Swelling with exquisite period detail, this film is an alternately heartbreaking and satirical look at the brutality of old-world America.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, approved by director Martin Scorsese, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interviews with Scorsese, coscreenwriter Jay Cocks, production designer Dante Ferretti, and costume designer Gabriella Pescucci
• Innocence and Experience, a 1993 documentary on the making of the film
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O'Brien

Hah! Not much of a special edition for this feeble and precious film!

Feeble my ass, this is a flat-out masterpiece, a great adaptation of a great novel, even if Michelle Pfeiffer feels a little miscast.

Indicator releases Sony films, don't they?
I wonder if this could be released by them!

if yes, I could hold on a bit more for this most favourite film of mine!

Costa wrote:Indicator releases Sony films, don't they?
I wonder if this could be released by them!

if yes, I could hold on a bit more for this most favourite film of mine!

Yes and no. Indicator hasn't released any title that Criterion has released. I fully expect Criterion will release this in the UK.

hearthesilence wrote:Feeble my ass, this is a flat-out masterpiece, a great adaptation of a great novel, even if Michelle Pfeiffer feels a little miscast.

I'm with you. Achingly romantic and heartbreaking. I can't get through the last 15 minutes without feeling like an emotional wreck.

dwk wrote:

Costa wrote:Indicator releases Sony films, don't they?
I wonder if this could be released by them!

if yes, I could hold on a bit more for this most favourite film of mine!

Yes and no. Indicator hasn't released any title that Criterion has released. I fully expect Criterion will release this in the UK.

Criterion UK is essentially a Sony operation (hence the huge bias towards Sony titles), and I suspect with any acquisitions since Criterion UK was formed they’ll have cleared the rights to both territories upfront.

Put it like this: I doubt I’m breaking any professional confidences when I confirm that it’s not on Indicator’s current slate, which presently goes up to Q1 2019.

MichaelB wrote:

dwk wrote:

Costa wrote:Indicator releases Sony films, don't they?
I wonder if this could be released by them!

if yes, I could hold on a bit more for this most favourite film of mine!

Yes and no. Indicator hasn't released any title that Criterion has released. I fully expect Criterion will release this in the UK.

Criterion UK is essentially a Sony operation (hence the huge bias towards Sony titles), and I suspect with any acquisitions since Criterion UK was formed they’ll have cleared the rights to both territories upfront.

Put it like this: I doubt I’m breaking any professional confidences when I confirm that it’s not on Indicator’s current slate, which presently goes up to Q1 2019.

Thank you MichaelB.
Yes, I figured too that since noone else has released this in UK till now, it will be Criterion.
Pity because I would love this film with the excellent encoding I see in Indicator blurays.

For me this film was always overshadowed by Terence Davis’ The House of Mirth, a far superior Wharton adaptation at a fraction of the budget. Gillian Anderson, looking like a John Singer Sargent painting come to life, broke my heart in that film. Wished it would come out on Blu-ray, it’s one of my favourite films of the turn of the millennium.

I agree completely: I found The Age of Innocence quite hard to watch after seeing The House of Mirth. There are lots of good things in it of course, especially the two central performances, but Scorsese's flamboyant style and (I'm sorry to say, because I'm usually a fan) Elmer Bernstein's overbearing score seem inappropriate to the subject matter, especially when placed alongside Davies' leisurely, subtle use of the camera, and his unerringly brilliant choice of music. The earlier novel is much more scathing and brutal, of course, whereas The Age of Innocence has a more affectionate attitude to the society being portrayed - so I guess it demands a brighter, livelier approach. I just found Scorsese's take on it a bit grating. And yes, it would be wonderful to see the Davies film on blu-ray.

I felt that House of Mirth was crippled even more by poor casting (Eric Stoltz? Dan Ackroyd?) though it had many things going for it. FWIW Davies himself is a great admirer of Scorsese's Age of Innocence, and I doubt his admitting so was just professional courtesy after several critics compared it unfavorably to his film.

whaleallright wrote:I felt that House of Mirth was crippled even more by poor casting (Eric Stoltz? Dan Ackroyd?) though it had many things going for it. FWIW Davies himself is a great admirer of Scorsese's Age of Innocence, and I doubt his admitting so was just professional courtesy after several critics compared it unfavorably to his film.

Personally I don't think Scorsese's film is miscast at all. I agree about Aykroyd's embarrassing, moustache-twirling performance in the Davies film, but I've never quite understood the objections to Stoltz. It feels like people expected him to provide something that isn't there in the character of Lawrence Selden, or in the relationship between him and Lily.

I've seen the 4k DCP so not surprisingly this looks excellent. FWIW, they had the matte painting for this shot displayed at the Scorsese exhibit at MoMI and it's pretty cool to see how impressionistic the details look up close. (Basically the landscape, the sky and the houses.)

I once talked to the prop master for this film. It really gave me an appreciation for what prop masters do, especially on a film like this, because even decades after it was over, he still sounded traumatized by it - he kept saying "I don't know how I did it." He pointed out that this was done before the internet became widely used, which meant doing a hell of a lot of research via printed material and literally knocking on countless doors just to track down the right objects. It wasn't just physical material research, he actually studied the history and social mores of that era, just to get a real understanding of what every object meant to the people seen in the story.

You definitely get a sense of that in this movie. There’s always interesting business with objects like the pen he uses, cigar accessories, the parasols, the gentleman’s hats in the wind, etc. Much more so than the Davies production.

I was a bit worried about the seemingly modest amount of special features for what is sure to be a tent pole title for Criterion, but from the review, the few there seem to be lengthy and substantive.

I am terribly excited for this release. I am more moved by this film every single time I see it.

hearthesilence wrote:...FWIW, they had the matte painting for this shot displayed at the Scorsese exhibit at MoMI and it's pretty cool to see how impressionistic the details look up close. (Basically the landscape, the sky and the houses.)...

I believe this approach was fairly standard for matte painting work done throughout the 20th century. It was either Peter Ellenshaw or Albert Whitlock (or both) who said that finely-detailed paintings looked less realistic on camera than ones that were more impressionistic.

Roger Ryan wrote:

hearthesilence wrote:...FWIW, they had the matte painting for this shot displayed at the Scorsese exhibit at MoMI and it's pretty cool to see how impressionistic the details look up close. (Basically the landscape, the sky and the houses.)...

I believe this approach was fairly standard for matte painting work done throughout the 20th century. It was either Peter Ellenshaw or Albert Whitlock (or both) who said that finely-detailed paintings looked less realistic on camera than ones that were more impressionistic.

They actually covered this in Criterion's extras for Rebecca (which I bought months after I saw the Scorsese exhibit). In that film, you'll notice the mattes are more illustrative, not impressionistic, and I think they mentioned this was reflective of the era - that is, studio departments would soon adopt a more impressionistic approach for the reasons mentioned by Ellenshaw and Whitlock.

I posted Indiewire's casual rankings of Scorsese's narrative films on the Scorsese thread. The surprise about that ranking was The Age of Innocence was number one. So, I came here to see what thoughts members had and there is nary a bit of analysis. Is this not a well received film by the Forum folks? :-k I do believe that this may be Scorseses's most psychological film and definitely a top ten if not a top five, although I wouldn't say it's the top Scorsese film.

It’s a great tragedy of being trapped within social systems as a Higher Power that prohibits authentic intimacy and existential value, where one only becomes a victim when they’re made aware of the spiritual ‘possible’ outside of that complacent rhythm. I appreciate Scorsese’s own provocative branding of this film as his most violent, and comparing high society to gangster milieus - Unlike the latter, there are no opportunities for even passive euphoric incentives along the path of engaging under this system by their rules

Well, they have nice dinners, like the gangsters do, and they get the opera instead of Henny Youngman.

FrauBlucher wrote: Sun Oct 22, 2023 5:32 pm I posted Indiewire's casual rankings of Scorsese's narrative films on the Scorsese thread. The surprise about that ranking was The Age of Innocence was number one. So, I came here to see what thoughts members had and there is nary a bit of analysis. Is this not a well received film by the Forum folks? :-k I do believe that this may be Scorseses's most psychological film and definitely a top ten if not a top five, although I wouldn't say it's the top Scorsese film.

Love this film and agree it's one of his very best. It's also one of my favorite novels, and seeing an adaptation that does it justice while being a great, personal interpretation is in itself very satisfying. Terence Davies once wrote, "there are four great voiceovers in cinema: William Holden in Sunset Boulevard; Joanne Woodward in The Age of Innocence; Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman; and, to my mind the greatest of them all, Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets," and I'm inclined to agree (with the addition of Orson Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons - given that it appears in one of Davies's films, I'm sure he might've agreed too). 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.

hearthesilence wrote: Sun Oct 22, 2023 8:28 pm ... 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).

I believe it was Jay Cocks in the interview on the disk, that they discussed Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon as a key influence in the decision to use voice-over for The Age of Innocence. They wanted to both foreground Wharton’s prose on its own merits and to use it to elucidate the specific social customs and hierarchies that might have remained obscure otherwise.