Books, Arts & Manners: The Past Recaptured

HOW does an action director handle an inaction movie? How does a kid from the mean streets direct a picture about genteel upper-class New York in the 1870s? Will it be like unleashing Jesse James on Henry James? Or will Martin Scorsese find a way of making love not war to Edith Wharton’s prose? I am happy to report that The Age of Innocence, though not quite a knockout, wins on points.

I must make the shameful confession of not having read Edith Wharton, though I have always suspected I would like her, if for no other reason than as an antidote to Henry James. So I came to this movie with the disadvantage of unpreparedness, of not knowing more than the average moviegoer, who may have heard of Ethan Frame (or Ethan Fromme, as the press kit squeakily puts it), but who certainly hasn’t read The Age of Innocence. This may have proved, in the event, an advantage, for I kept hoping against hope that the principals would not end in quiet desperation: that the terribly well-bred and enormously eligible Newland Archer and the lovely but semi-besmirched Countess Ellen Olenska would find the courage to do the unthinkable—defy the proprieties, kick over the already loosening conventions, and head for a life of unwedded bliss in Paris or the South Seas.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

HOW does an action director handle an inaction movie? How does a kid from the mean streets direct a picture about genteel upper-class New York in the 1870s? Will it be like unleashing Jesse James on Henry James? Or will Martin Scorsese find a way of making love not war to Edith Wharton’s prose? I am happy to report that The Age of Innocence, though not quite a knockout, wins on points.

I must make the shameful confession of not having read Edith Wharton, though I have always suspected I would like her, if for no other reason than as an antidote to Henry James. So I came to this movie with the disadvantage of unpreparedness, of not knowing more than the average moviegoer, who may have heard of Ethan Frame (or Ethan Fromme, as the press kit squeakily puts it), but who certainly hasn’t read The Age of Innocence. This may have proved, in the event, an advantage, for I kept hoping against hope that the principals would not end in quiet desperation: that the terribly well-bred and enormously eligible Newland Archer and the lovely but semi-besmirched Countess Ellen Olenska would find the courage to do the unthinkable—defy the proprieties, kick over the already loosening conventions, and head for a life of unwedded bliss in Paris or the South Seas.