My #SoundtrackSunday timing with this one has proven fortuitous. Not long after I discovered Elmer Bernstein’s richly detailed classicist score finally had been pressed as a 2LP gatefold package — which I immediately acquired — I then realized Martin Scorsese’s sumptuous adaptation of Edith Wharton’s tragic romance is streaming until the end of this month on the Criterion Channel. (Gift idea for film friends: a yearlong subscription.)
As much a subtly damning satire of life among Gilded Age elites in burgeoning NYC as it is a ravishing remembrance of times gone by, the movie enchanted me back in ’93, despite what I suspect remains is a rather unconvincing performance from Winona Ryder, out of her depth alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, not to mention Daniel Day-Lewis, inarguably the greatest actor of his generation. What I notice right away now, as I peek at it again 30 years later, are all the influences on Scorsese that I was too inexperienced and uneducated to spot the first time. I’d studied enough to know an iris shot from a closeup, but I hadn’t yet seen anything from my heroes Powell & Pressburger, the uniquely fantastical filmmaking duo who have since become all-time faves of mine behind Welles and Altman. Their style warms and embroiders every frame of this beauty, and now I’m seeing ‘The Age of Innocence’ with entirely new eyes (to say nothing of decades of heartbreak). As with seemingly everything else by Scorsese, a director incapable of producing unwatchable cinema, the more you know his inspirations, the more enthralling his art becomes.
SoundtrackSunday 005:
‘The Age of Innocence’
Epic Soundtrax, 1993 / this pressing: Sony Classical, 2022
d: Martin Scorsese
s: Elmer Bernstein