The Age of Innocence (1993)

If I hadn't been so charmed by Edith Wharton's novel I would probably not have sat through The Age of Innocence (Scorsese). Famous actors abound but the acting is conventional. So is the approach to the story. What thrilled me about the book - its critique of societal mores and its take on several forms of adherence to a dominating set of ideals about how life should be led - is almost totally absent. This is revealed especially in the film's much more sympathetic rendering of the characters. In the book, all characters are complex, and the main character is a rather repulsive spineless man who lives his life in a half-hearted way. Unsurprisingly, the movie focuses one-dimensionally on the love story between the main character, a man who wants to do the right things even though his heart is not in it - and the woman who is a bit of a social pariah due to her adventures in Europe (the story takes place in the 1870's). The film, as the novel, deals with the cruelty in a society that requires that one is all the time to keep up certain standards of morality, that one is to give a certain appearance of oneself and one's willingness to play along. There is a dimension of submission that is hidden in that social web of relations, and the film largely takes its departure from that angle. But unlike Wharton's novel, the film never succeeds in making this tale about crushing respectability moving, nor does it capture the sense of fear I found in the book, how people fear themselves and their own reactions. It tries hard, but it is lost in its unimaginative choices (pretty landscapes, costumes, literary dialogue). I would have like a more risky approach, an approach that shows what matters in the story. As it is now, one easily reacts in this way: ok this is a society long gone: we don't live according to such social codes anymore; we are free to do whatever we want!