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Posted: |
Feb 18, 2015 - 6:13 AM
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By: |
Regie
(Member)
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I love this wonderful film, though I don't agree that it's Scorsese's 'most brutal'. Think of his mafia films first in that regard!!
Day-Lewis was extraordinary, as usual, in "Age of Innocence" and if you've read the book by Edith Wharton you'll see that Newland Archer was far less sympathetic than his portrayal on the screen. Very hard and calculating in the novel.
One favourite scene is the one in the carriage when Newland opens Ellen's glove and kisses the flesh on her inside wrist - very erotically charged. Another favourite scene is when they are at the opera, which is melodramatic, and the scene is isolated in a kind of 'iris' showing the connection between them. Newland says to Ellen Olenska that he's sympathetic with the main character who has a broken heart. She says to him, "and do you think he would send her a bunch of yellow roses?" This scene tells us that she knows Newland is in love with her, and she with him. Very subtle; very powerful.
And, of course, the superb score by Elmer Bernstein.
Can somebody please explain why they think Newland won't go and see Ellen in her apartment in Paris right at the end of the film. It's enigmatic. He walks away.
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Posted: |
Feb 18, 2015 - 1:30 PM
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By: |
Regie
(Member)
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Can somebody please explain why they think Newland won't go and see Ellen in her apartment in Paris right at the end of the film. It's enigmatic. He walks away.
Hi Regie, you still don't agree with the ending, eh?
He closed that chapter years ago in my opinion, which I shall reiterate - because he already decided to throw his lot in with his wife and that is where the greater balance of his loyalty still resided even after her death - and if you say the character was so calculating in the novel then just maybe Scorsese decided to instil the full weight of that trait. Don't forget the irony in the fact it was his son through his wife who had reopened the old wound. Just think what would have happened if he had agreed to meet the countess? The story would have lost all credibility. Even if there had been a scene tagged on in which they had met, it would have been done with the hard fact of brutal formality and the outcome would have been just the same, being unnecessary and at odds with the rest of the film's content.
To have gone further with a fairytale ending and 'merged' the couple would also have destroyed the internal logic of the age and, hence, of Newland's persona.
Lucid and credible explanation. Many thanks. I wasn't thinking of 'fairytale' as Newland was, after all, a 'senior' by then with adult children. And it's in the book, of course. I felt that Bernstein's exquisite score provided a powerful emotional counterpoint which was, for me at least, somewhat at odds with that decision of Newland not to climb those stairs. Personally, if I felt latent 'grief' at the loss of a past love that would mean I still had unresolved feelings for that person. And, of course, his loyalty to his wife came at such a terrible personal cost. I speak of the film here because, as I said, Newland was more sympathetically fashioned than Wharton's creation. That scene in the carriage after they were married when the narrator says "there would be many such conversations..." and the fact that Mae 'wore him down' - that was a shocking moment in the film for Newland, to realize the consequences of his decision. But Wharton's Newland was colder, more calculating and quite snobbish into the bargain. Easy to feel sympathy for Daniel Day-Lewis and his cultured charm and interior pain than a calculating character pushing your buttons from the page. I think Bernstein's score means that he made a decision, along with Scorsese, to fashion a likeable and sympathetic Newland. All this is powerful testimony to the importance of film music and its ability to shape narrative - as if we need to be reminded!!
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In the book, Newland has a line at the end, further elucidating why he doesn't go up. He says, "It's better here than if I went up."
He sees her window opened, catching the light, and he's back seeing her standing on the shore. He knows it's the fantasy of her that he had thought of rekindling. But he realizes he's happier with his memories than trying to make an effort to create something that actually ended long ago.
I found Bernstein's underscore here mesmerizing; it captures perfectly the real epiphany that Archer reaches, how we can never really go back where we were, and it's time to move on.
Bernstein was nominated for an Oscar for this score, and didn't win, which I still think is a crime.
I believe it's certainly the best of his final scores.
And also a great film, certainly one of Scorsese's best, so different from his Mafia-crony explorations.
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Posted: |
Feb 19, 2015 - 2:45 AM
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By: |
Regie
(Member)
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In the book, Newland has a line at the end, further elucidating why he doesn't go up. He says, "It's better here than if I went up."
He sees her window opened, catching the light, and he's back seeing her standing on the shore. He knows it's the fantasy of her that he had thought of rekindling. But he realizes he's happier with his memories than trying to make an effort to create something that actually ended long ago.
I found Bernstein's underscore here mesmerizing; it captures perfectly the real epiphany that Archer reaches, how we can never really go back where we were, and it's time to move on.
Bernstein was nominated for an Oscar for this score, and didn't win, which I still think is a crime.
I believe it's certainly the best of his final scores.
And also a great film, certainly one of Scorsese's best, so different from his Mafia-crony explorations.
Well, I think you've nailed it here. "The real epiphany that Archer reaches"...apposite.
I agree that score is superb. Along with "Mockingbird", I think it Bernstein's finest.
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Posted: |
Feb 19, 2015 - 4:26 AM
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By: |
Ralph
(Member)
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“The Age of Innocence” would otherwise seem the atmospherics for Ivory and Merchant, for the deluxe visions of Visconti or John De Cuir. Made in honor of Wyler’s “The Heiress,” and designed by Dante Ferretti, “A of I” also has an undeniable resemblance to Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander.” Like that feast, Scorsese’s equally fancy and rich with detail — everything’s splashed as layouts from Architectural Digest and Gourmet — and you could get woozy and have to hit the smelling salts. He picked the right Wharton material for his second (“New York, New York” the first) foray into American period piece: his lovers are ruled by class snobbery not too distant from the sociopaths and goons who rule in his charged-up contemporary Americana. The central difference is that there are no bloodbaths as pornography, though the lavish spreads here are rather porno-ish in 1% arbitrariness. That’s part of Wharton’s appeal: surveying the social dictums her characters are pressured to accept, she’s trapped them in orgies of addictive lushness. And Wharton herself more than most: born in France, she lived the exceedingly pampered life of high social class New York and Europe. (Like Mark Twain before her and F. Scott Fitzgerald after, she did much of her writing in the comfort of her bed. Once, when discovering that a hotel room bed didn’t face the light, she flew into a “fit of hysterics.”) The first woman to win a Pulitzer and receive an honorary degree from Yale, Wharton would perform, often at her chateau in Hyeres, readings of her works-in-progress to Henry James and French novelist Paul Bourget, specialists in the psychological. Both protégé of and traveling companion to James, she used his novel “The Bostonians” as foundation for “A of I,” replicating not so much his prose style but his biting annotations interlaced into the narrative. Her work, though, isn’t an analytic study of romance unconsummated — it’s about high society poison, about hypocrisy over values, relinquishing ourselves to others’ unearned demands of imperatives we fear to reject, fearing to be locked out or prevented from achieving social approval. Yet we’re not sure which side she’s really on. In “Maugham,” biographer Ted Morgan writes that Somerset “was exasperated by the rightness and exactness of everything Wharton said,” and particularly out of joint by her usage of “no,” for he “had never heard a more frigid syllable of disapproval.” The essence of Wharton as social prisoner, an abject failure in love. She was likely poisoned by her mother’s frigidness, which might have made her the anti-feminist she appeared to be in opposing education of women for high professions, not exercising her right to vote, and rarely if ever inviting other women to her soirées. (A recent biographer suggests she was both homophobic and anti-Semitic, and disapproved of Joyce and Lawrence; one wonders to what degree she was aware of James’ predilections.) The undetermined Victorian vengeance in her story telling is regrettable — she’s compulsive about punishing lovers; she punished them in “Ethan Frome,” too. The only touch of modernity that Scorsese risks is allowing the unfulfilled love between Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska to anger us. His gamble is not to give in and change to what today’s audiences want. If we’re more than eager to flaunt contempt for social conspiracies, dictates and sacrifices, Newland assumes the snob rules and expectations, forfeiting passion and gentlemanly moves on. Catching Wharton’s gilded spider’s web, Scorsese’s assisted by Time critic Jay Cocks who shapes the envenom into a screenplay that exalts the power of words. Thrilling to hear text captured with this much respect. And it’s elating to see art come to life — Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and winter scenes by Richard Hartmann and Childe Hassam. There’s a happy marriage of editing and text: Thelma Schoonmaker (whose name is plastered as advertisement) lays on montages of messages and invitations reminding us of the lost art of personal dispatch. We’re even served Wharton’s hors d’oeuvres — deliciously voiced over by Joanne Woodward as parenthetical gossip whispered for our ears only.
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