It seems that stories about forbidden love are still popular here in 21st century America, despite such a scenario having been a fantasy for generations of Americans. The Age of Innocence is one such movie with quite a bit to recommend it. For one thing, it's got the always-awesome Daniel Day Lewis playing conflicted man-about-town Newland Archer, a man of liberal opinions but conservative temperament who learns too late that he's married a woman he can barely stand, and spends much of the rest of the film falling in love with a woman he cannot have. Even before he goes off the market, Countess Ellen Olenska is simply not an option to Archer, a man who embodies the conflict between a head that rejects all the bullshit that his society peddles while his heart can never stray from his society's edicts, even after that society is long gone. What's more, Ellen has him pegged from early on in the movie. At one point, after she asks if he wants her to become his mistress, he remarks about how he wants to go somewhere where such terms don't exist. She retorts that she's been there all along, and that he isn't. And yet she prods the affair along. Newland and Ellen manage to destroy each other's chances for happiness, spend much of their lives apart in what can only be thought to be a pair of very dreary existences (she with a monstrous Polish nobleman, and he with the pretty but utterly conventional and boring May Welland Archer, played by Winona Ryder). They are both eventually liberated from their travails, but he still cannot pull the trigger on a relationship, despite both of their spouses being dead, despite the society he once stood a frenemy to having long since fallen apart--those unspoken rules run deeper than all that. They are inside him. It is an almost religious conviction: Archer's adherence to the societal code in which he was raised seems to go even deeper than religion, although the work in general is steeped in the sort of Calvinist, predestination-centric ethic that no doubt so infuriated Edith Wharton, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based, back in her day.
The Age of Innocence is, needless to say, a pretty intense love story. It is often regarded as one of Wharton's greatest books, and deservedly so. What is so striking about the film is how faithful the translation from book to screen is--much of Wharton's prose survives intact, hardly any plot point or character is excised. As far as I can tell, only a single change from the book was made (aside from the necessary cutting and so forth): one scene is set in a law office in the book, and in the film it is set in Archer's home. This is the only significant difference that I can see. And yet, Scorsese manages to bring the film to life without even a single false moment. Every detail feels right, every color appropriate, every glance and smile with a hidden meaning. Scorsese creates a film that adapts the book less than embodies it, and adds countless touches that enhance the experience.
This gets into a discussion of how to best adapt a book for the screen--a topic fraught with difficulty. Fans of a given novel will probably be annoyed with the movie regardless of how it turns out--they'll cry out about how "the book was better" when that was obviously not the case (no, I have never read The Shining, although I'm pretty sure the Kubrick film was far superior to the book). Adaptations are fraught with difficulty, as the limitations of film, in terms of time and of just what can be shown on screen, come into play in a serious way. Lots of stuff is going to have to be cut out, and new detail will have to be added, particularly in the visual area.
So, the tradeoff comes down to this: do I want a director who decides to take some source material and try to faithfully reproduce it on the screen, or do I want a director who takes a risk and puts his own spin on things? Ideally, I want both, right? With The Age of Innocence, we get more of the former, and that seems to be what most people prefer. Hence the popularity of the Harry Potter movies, of which I have seen none, though they are notorious for being heavily reliant on the books.
I find it very interesting that people would read through an enormous book, go and buy tickets to the movie based upon the book, and then want to experience the same exact story, down to a tee, recapitulated back to them. Perhaps they merely want to relive a book that they enjoyed reading, and I suppose that's understandable. Still, I generally prefer something with a bit more imagination to it--one's creative vision shouldn't be subservient to that of the author of the source material. I like to see adaptations that respect the source while showing us things we wouldn't have noticed from the book. A good adaptation is, in a word, a synthesis: a combination of two different imaginations and worldviews. It's a grafting of someone's sensibility onto someone else's. It might work out well or work out poorly, but I'd just as soon take the chance to see where it leads.
And yet I adore The Age of Innocence. It is just about as good as the book, although I highly recommend reading the book first: getting lost in Wharton's world is easy, and her prose sparkles throughout her novels. But it takes quite a while to get through The Age of Innocence, and the movie distills the book quite effectively, preserving not only the essence but the entire body of the book. It is, in short, a film which does justice to its source material, and one which is highly recommended.
