Review of The Age of Innocence (1993) by Dann M — 27 Mar 2012

Scorsese's style is always energetic and skillful, but doesn't really fit for an emotionally based period piece. His ever-moving camera and creative touches (fades to bright white/red/yellow, irising in on a private scene of dialogue, intense lighting changes) did less to enhance the emotions and more to pull me out of the movie since those bits seemed out of place.

But since I'm not a tremendous fan of costume dramas getting pulled out of the story to examine creative directorial touches was actually fine with me. Like Scorsese's near masterpiece Casino, The Age of Innocence also suffers from an excess of narration, except here it sounds like a boring old lady reading a dreadful bedtime story to an unfortunate child.

And I understand that the obscene amount of fades (really there's just so many) were a stylistic choice to fit the mood, but since I prefer cuts to fades whenever possible I started to get annoyed by them after a while.

Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer are both really good. Winona Ryder seems less out of place here than she does in Dracula or Star Trek, but more out of place than Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands.