Good Fellow in Old New York

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

DIRECTOR: MARTIN SCORSESE

WRITERS: JAY COCKS AND MARTIN SCORSESE

THE BOTTOM LINE: A gravely beautiful morality play of longing and loss.

In the New York society of the 1870s, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a true romantic gentleman. He is romantic because he wants to shrug off the opera cape of domestic respectability and follow his heart to hell with the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). He is a gentleman because, having already declared his love to pretty May Welland (Winona Ryder), he is bound to behave honorably. He knows that when passion and propriety collide, only bitter defeat may rise from the wreckage.

Newland is the hero of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, and in his emotional corset he may seem a supporting player in life's melodrama, as far from the noisy concerns of our day as Polonius. The drawing-room virtues of reticence and gentility are considered dead in the Age of Prurience. Yet they still govern our lives whenever we check an impulse to explode in love or anger -- when we don't shout at a reckless motorist, or we keep quiet when we mean to proclaim our ardor. If Richard Kimble is a hero for our fugitive fantasy egos, Newland Archer is the patron saint of our everyday conscience, the coachman on our journey as the years dissolve into decades and the decades into decay.

Wharton was a poet of repression. Another New Yorker, Martin Scorsese, is the bard of belligerence, the ace depictor of raging bulls. What could Wharton mean to Scorsese? Everything, it turns out: his faithful adaptation of The Age of Innocence (written with Jay Cocks, a TIME contributor) is a gravely beautiful fairy tale of longing and loss.

The heroine is Ellen Olenska, May's cousin, now separated from her European aristocrat husband and thus the subject of purring rumor from the town's smooth hypocrites. As the radiantly giddy May seems a child to Newland, so he feels like a boy in Ellen's presence. The two fall in furtive love. But it is not falling so much as tiptoeing in the dark. Once he kisses her slipper; later he unbuttons her glove and kisses her wrist, then her mouth, which opens more in anguish than in lust. Guilt is the barrier between their lips. And both could be underestimating sweet May; the child has a will and means of her own.

Scorsese's style is still intelligently abustle: fast dissolves of an opera audience, a quiet riot of gold when the blond countess receives yellow roses from Newland, a slow-motion vignette of working men -- the people whose labor subsidizes the idle class. Throughout, he shows he can be as attentive to the tiniest twinges of the heart as he has been to the gunfire of taxi drivers and goodfellas. Here, instead of shouting, people speak softly and in code. The movie is 135 thrilling minutes waiting for someone to come to the point. And that is the point: a man is at risk in this society if he says what he thinks or does what he feels.

The three stars (Day-Lewis superbly stooped by rectitude, Pfeiffer so elegant and bruised, Ryder a young Audrey Hepburn in all her wide-eyed guile) are swathed in glamorous costumes and period decor. The congestion of old masters on a matron's wall suggests the confined space in which the story unfolds and the straitened notions to which Newland and Ellen must pay homage. The handsomely fussy design is meant to dazzle and deaden the viewer's senses -- as Newland is seduced by Ellen and suffocated by May.

The story is finally May's triumph, Ellen's rue, Newland's muted ruin. For him it is a tragedy, because he has been made aware of joys anticipated, delayed, crushed. Frequently he rewrites the tryst in his mind: one moment when Ellen might have caressed him, another when she could have turned around, smiled and changed his life.

Why can't we love without hurting people, without being devoured? That is a child's question, of course, and so plaintive because it can't be answered. Listening to this urgent whisper against the constraints of civilization, you can hear an old Scorsese bull snort under its breath. This is the rage of innocence.