TAKING "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton's sad and elegantly funny novel about New York's highest society in the 1870's, Martin Scorsese has made a gorgeously uncharacteristic Scorsese film. It would be difficult to imagine anything further removed from the director's canon than Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning page-turner, not even "The Last Temptation of Christ."
Yet with a fine cast headed by Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder, Mr. Scorsese has made a big, intelligent movie that functions as if it were a window on a world he had just discovered, and about which he can't wait to spread the news.
The Wharton novel is far more than a romantic tale of a love that can never be. It's a deliciously hard-edged satire of the manners and customs of a small, inbred, very privileged circle of people in an era already long past when the book was published in 1920. Mr. Scorsese's outsider's fascination with the rules of this world matches that of Wharton, whose novel is a bittersweet recollection of the world she was born into, and eventually broke away from.
Working from her text in an adaptation written with Jay Cocks, Mr. Scorsese takes an anthropologist's view of the desperate plight of the three central characters. They are Newland Archer (Mr. Day-Lewis), a rich, well-born young lawyer; his most proper fiancee, May Welland (Ms. Ryder), and the worldly Ellen Olenska (Ms. Pfeiffer), May's first cousin, who has recently returned to New York as a countess after leaving her dissolute Polish husband.
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