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Declaring any single film out of Martin Scorsese’s vast oeuvre to be his best is a fool’s errand, but if forced to pick a personal favourite, on some days it’s one of his most neglected, overlooked masterpieces: The Age of Innocence (1993). I’m not here to argue against the validity of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas as worthy classics, but rather to make a case for a reading of Scorsese that takes in the breadth of his work instead of reducing him to one thing. He’s the most celebrated of all living American filmmakers, and yet he may be one of the most misunderstood. The director of gangster films is how the public knows him best, but his tales of male anguish and abuse, of obsession, of existential dread and emptiness, of sin (in a sense more expansive than just violence, but real mortal sin), of artistic ambition and fear of failure is not limited to any single genre or milieu. In fact, at no point in his career has Scorsese stopped trying new things, always trying to push the medium and his own work forward. He has reinvented himself time and time again all the while breathing new life into cinema every step of the way.

The Dalai Lama, Howard Hughes, a single mother on the road with her son, an all-star rock group exhausted with their lifestyle, star-crossed lovers in a jazz band, a hapless everyman on the worst night of his life, a pool shark, a sociopathic wannabee star, and Jesus Christ (!)—that range of subjects and characters across his films puts most filmmakers to shame. Pigeonholed as a director of violence, the spectrum of human experience and emotion in the works of Martin Scorsese can not be summarized in any simple way. Even within the crime films, it is other qualities irrespective of the genre and plot that resonate most strongly. The finest of his crime films, Casino, is a tragic opera hardly about gangsters at all, but rather the relentless pain and unhappiness associated with self-hating and self-destructive characters bound and destroyed by their relationships with each other.

That brings us back to The Age of Innocence, which on the surface may appear as one of the least Scorsese of all Scorsese films (at least on this side of Kundun). There are no guns, no Rolling Stones music cues, no motor-mouths whacking wise guys. This may not be your Scorsese or the Scorsese pop culture has created, but this is as Scorsese as it gets. Adapted from Edith Wharton’s book, Age of Innocence is a devastating story of repression, societal oppression, and unrealized romance, the film follows the decades-long would-be love affair of Newland Archer and the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) beginning in the 1870s. Opening at a virtuoso sequence set at an opera, Scorsese introduces us to a world of watchers and whisperers dividing their attention between the unabashed emotions on the stage and the potential sources of gossip in the audience signified by fellow socialites’ choices in wardrobe and company. Thick with irony, the expression of such deep feeling as belted out by the performers in artful release is precisely what the high society characters we’ll come to know need and never get. The true thoughts and sentiments of the Gilded Age New York elite are kept in drawers never to be revealed. Insecurities and envy manifest in venomous gossip in smoking rooms. No one says what they mean and if they did, their place in this society would be threatened. Come to think of it, that’s not so removed from the high stakes of the social order of gangsters in Goodfellas or Mean Streets.

Newland is already happily engaged with May Welland (Winona Ryder) in a union that will bring two of New York’s finest families together. But the Countess, who has just returned from Poland where her marriage has resulted in scandal, immediately catches his eye and never lets it go. Ostracized for having abandoned her unfaithful husband, and moreover for wanting a divorce, Countess Olenska earns the sympathy and admiration of Newland, who secretly questions the values he and others slavishly uphold. As time passes, Newland remains loyal to May even as their romance dwindles, and in his meetings with Olenska, ostensibly in a professional capacity to advise her on her divorce, cast glances and imagined embraces are as intimate as their relationship can become.

Omnisciently narrated by Joanne Woodward, Scorsese takes advantage of having much of the expository scene-setting done in voiceover, permitting him to focus on crafting intricate sequences that unfold this world of appearances and coded behaviour in purely cinematic terms, making for one of his most ornately designed films. In a party held at the Beaufort House—Beaufort being a powerful man who also seems to have his eyes on Olenska—after the aforementioned opera, a ballroom that we are told is otherwise closed 364 days out of the year comes alive in a graceful series of dissolves, filling up with people who are ornaments as much as any of the lavish décor that surrounds them. We discover the cavernous drawing rooms leading to the ballroom as the camera tracks behind Archer offering his dutiful greetings along the way. The mise en scène emphasizes the decadence and posturing at every turn with a painterly sensibility.

The increasingly frustrated Archer, whose growing affection is matched by his disgust at everyone’s discarding of Countess Olenska, strategically defends her in formal settings, at the dinner table with family where everyone is framed between candles that keep everyone just where they ought to be, articulating the invisible oppression that controls everything. In a post-prandial chat in the smoking room, the men can speak a little more freely, but still with the utmost of tact, complete with the ceremonial lighting and puffing of cigars.

Objects and colours tell us much about hidden meanings. An iris-in to May’s engagement ring highlights the social preciousness of the item whereas an iris-in on the lush yellows of the roses Archer starts to routinely send to Countess Olenska offers an alternative to the dark colours amidst which she stands out to him. The yellow rose also connects back to the opening opera sequence, in which the flower plays a role as a symbol in the performance. Meanwhile, the obligatory lilies of the valley that Archer sends his fiancée are linked to the white flower he wears over his heart in the opening scene, a play between what he presents to the world, and what remains repressed and acted out for him.

In a series of conversations at Olenska’s home, a fireplace crackles with the desire they can’t act on. Eventually, the room’s furniture is covered up as the opportunity fades. Clasped hands and muted expressions tell us everything. Inspired by the subtextual emotions under the surface of Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously designed Barry Lyndon, everything, even shot reverse-shot sequences, move according to a sense of musicality. The momentous style Scorsese is known for is here harnessed for a less masculine, more formal approach. The specificity of the milieu is one thing, but the film’s transcendent beauty comes from its articulation of a live lived and the path not taken, the decisions we make and doors we close, whether by our own accord or to preserve social standing. Memory of love and missed opportunity, and its insistence on mingling with our present, is here shown in melancholic elegance. If there is hope tucked into the film it’s in how that which is unrealized still burns brightly but, as in much of Scorsese, choices and their consequences lead us not to others, but, painfully, only to ourselves.

Part of a string of features that found Scorsese at his most formally exuberant and innovative, from 1991’s Cape Fear through The Age of Innocence, Casino, and Kundun in 1997, every shot is painstakingly composed, each sequence constructed with a level of grace that would make the classical Hollywood greats weep. This is his opus, his most emotional and most expressive movie, at least as wrenchingly personal as the films that made his name, that finds Scorsese’s power at its loudest in the eloquent silence of heartbreak.

This piece was originally published in The TIFF Review in 2017.

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