The Age of Innocence
1993 Directed by Martin Scorsese
Synopsis
Tale of 19th century New York high society in which a young lawyer falls in love with a woman separated from her husband, while he is engaged to the woman's cousin.
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Top five Scorsese for me easily. Will write about it at length at some point. Er... somewhere.
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I'd like to personally thank Cinebro from recommending me this film. It's pretty good, at least it is technically speaking.
I'm not the biggest fan of period costume dramas like these. Not that I don't enjoy the subgenre. In fact there are some I like and others I flat out love. It's that it's hard for some to sustain my interests. This one especially just isn't my flavor. It's not bad, in fact some can say it's great and they'd be right. I was just a little bored with it; not completely engaged as I should have. Also, it all feels to much like a stage melodrama for my tastes. Kinda like some tv romance you'd find on BBC. Plus,…
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The facade and the soul.
Elegance and refinement.
Class and fashion.
Repression and regret.
Obedience and the status-quo.
Beauty and tragedy. -
Pretty to look at, and just as distracting, but so is a screensaver. Notable for Winona Ryder opening her eyes wider than a giant squid for two hours and getting an Oscar nod for it.
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One of the few Scorsese films I had not yet seen. Visually this film is staggering, the opulence of the sets, the costumes, the props, the food is excessively fetishistic, by design of course, as the story focuses on how the suffocating superficiality of bourgeois manners and tastes in 19th century New York conspire against the modest desires of the heart. Adapted from the classic novel by Edith Wharton, the movie never lets you forget its literary origins; a plodding narration weighs heavily on the proceedings at every turn describing the visuals as Wharton would have had it. This I could for the most part tolerate, but in the end the love story between the characters played by Daniel Day…
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When The Age of Innocence was released, most of the press focused on it as a departure from Scorsese's other films; two decades later, it's much easier to see the film not as what it isn't but for what a remarkable accomplishment it is. A faithful adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel, The Age of Innocence's depiction of high society in turn-of-the-century New York is filled with characters who commit acts emotional violence towards each other as severe, in their way, as the beatings and stabbings in Goodfellas. The protagonist, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), is an attorney engaged to marry the affluent May Welland (Winona Ryder). When May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to America from Europe to…
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Desires in private
hurt when they don't jive
with the desires of public. -
A great, enriching experience. A masterpiece on love, loss, regret, sacrifice. Martin Scorsese, respect once again!
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A great, enriching experience. A masterpiece on love, loss, regret, sacrifice. Martin Scorsese, respect once again!
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74
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I love Martin Scorsese
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Top five Scorsese for me easily. Will write about it at length at some point. Er... somewhere.
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I'm not entirely sure how I would've gone about adapting the novel, but this is definitely not the way I would've chosen.
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The film's overwhelming substance does not match up to the technique. As much as there are many existential questions to be asked, with their cultural contexts and still-relevant ponderings, the film lacks consistency and solidity, which amounts to, "It doesn't matter how much you want to say about something. Technique is the most important".
In here, I do not mean technique as technical achievements, with its Rococo sets and camera-work, I mean it as a script, the structure. As much as the "old" New York mannerisms, furniture, and walls are bright and colorful, the film itself is dull, as it is "showing off", not "showing". If "showing off" worked for Goodfellas and Casino, it did not work for this story, which might have been a good chamber play, rather than an epic.
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Devastating.