Review of The Age of Innocence (1993) by David M — 06 Dec 2009

This is not a movie to watch if you want action, story, or involved characters. All of those take a back seat to the meticulous detail to a period. The film is mostly about the look, feel, and life of this time period. It is also a tale of forbidden love, and much like that love which is never expressed by more than a one-sided kiss, the movie never really takes you anywhere.

The acting is good, if not a little one-note from the female leads, and I'm sorry, but Winona didn't deserve a Oscar Nom for her part. Daniel Day-Lewis is fantastic as always, but the part still seems a little boring after watching him explode into some of his other roles, here he's restrained, but he really brings that subtlety and pain of restraint to life. May (Ryder) is the perfect, naive, and well-to-do girl, who may have a little bit of a darker side, and may know more than she lets on. Olenska (Pfeiffer) is the outcasted divorcee whose wild life is completely unacceptable by this higher up society. Newland (Day-Lewis) is engaged to May, and sees all the angles of this society, but also sees the hypocrisy of it all, and longs to get away from it, and sees the opportunity in countess Olenska, but can never realize the love, for all the complications of maintaining the formality of public life.

Some of the directing choices were odd as well, which I wouldn't expect to say from a Scorsese picture. The zeroing in on people by fading out the rest of the screen, to highlight specific conversations or items on screen, seemed a little over-the-top. Some of the fade-outs to colored screens were odd and random, and dates the film a little.