The Age of Innocence

February is the month of love, and while there are a million lightweight romantic comedies, there are only a few movies that address the real power and complexity of romantic love. There are fewer still that do so while simultaneously being well-acted, beautifully shot, and artfully constructed. One film that does all this and more is Martin Scorcese’s 1993 picture, The Age of Innocence.

Of course, Scorcese is most famous for his bloody, f-word packed epics about crime, greed, and insanity. You wouldn’t think that the maker of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street would be responsible for one of the most delicate and lovely literary adaptations in film – but he is. 

 The Age of Innocence adapts Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1920 novel of the same name. It is the story of high society in old New York. Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer, a well-heeled young man from a good family engaged to marry the girlish, naïve May Welland, played by 90s it-girl Winona Ryder. Newland is in high society but not of it. Privately, he looks down on the repressive, restrictive social culture and on the gossiping and vanity of his peers. Nevertheless, he’s a good boy from a good family and so he gamely lives his life in that world. But then May’s mysterious, exotic cousin Ellen returns to town, fleeing a bad marriage to a European count. Ellen is played by 90s it-woman, Michelle Pfeiffer. 

 

Ellen, having spent most of her life in Europe, is almost completely out of touch with the unspoken rules and expectations that hang in the air at every dinner party and soiree. Though their relationship begins in innocence, Newland, who is charmed and fascinated by Ellen’s causal flouting of tradition, slowly falls in love with her. Being engaged to her cousin and living in a world where the slightest whisper of scandal can ruin a family forever makes this awkward to say the least.

When the film came out, few people saw it, and it actually lost money. That’s a shame because it really is one of the most lovely, lovingly constructed films I’ve ever seen. Every tool at a filmmaker’s disposal is on glowing display. The opening credits alone are a marvel of color, sound, and design. Joanne Woodward’s knowing, slightly weary narration sets the wise, sad tone for the film. Everyone’s performance from Daniel Day Lewis’s convincing mix of duty and desire to Richard E. Grant’s oily gossip-about-town Larry Lefferts is exactly right. The production design and cinematography in particular are marvelous. Each image is silky and saturated with rich color and deep blacks, while the camera movement and editing are lively. Scorcese confidently uses expressionistic lighting and devices like iris shots to get the maximum amount of story and emotion out of each shot, but he never goes too far. For a director known for excess, one of his greatest tricks in The Age of Innocence is how Scorcese conveys passion and power all with tremendous restraint. It’s a perfect choice for a film about bridling one’s passions.

Ultimately, the film is about love and the choices, sacrifices, and compromises we make in its name. Even though Newland is in love with Ellen, he marries May and stays with her out of a sense of duty and a different kind of love.  The film suggests that sometimes life and relationships don’t turn out how you think they will but also that sometimes they do turn out exactly how you planned but you find it wasn’t what you really wanted. The film is heartbreaking and beautiful, exhilarating, and complicated. A lot like love.  

Hail, Caesar!

One interesting thing about sibling filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen is that, as they have built up their quirky filmography, they have worked in just about every genre. They haven’t made a straight up horror or sci fi movie yet (though doesn’t that sound like a trip – a science fiction movie by the Coen brothers?) but they’ve made westerns, musicals, film noir, comedies, and gangster pictures. They clearly are great movie fans and know enough about the conventions of each genre to pay homage while often upending them to create their own take on each type of movie. Their range is wide and yet they always manage to maintain the distinctive combination of darkness, intelligence, and absurdity that is their hallmark. 

 It’s interesting that with their latest film, Hail, Caesar!, the Coens turn their attention to the movies themselves. They’ve been in this territory once before in 1991’s Barton Fink. But while Barton Fink was about a Hollywood outsider, Hail, Caesar! is all about the inside of the Dream Factory during the height of its powers in the 1950s.    

 

 Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix who was a real person and worked as a “fixer” for MGM studios. In the Coen brothers’ universe, Eddie is a fixer for Capitol Pictures and spends his days covering up starlets unexpected  pregnancies and getting stars out of doing jail time for drunk driving. He helps solve problems for the latest sword and sandal epic and the newest singing cowboy western, hopping from soundstage to soundstage. Brolin plays Mannix as a loyal company man and a wholesome husband and father who has to function as the grown-up in a sea of troubled Hollywood types.

 

The story begins when George Clooney’s character, Baird Whitlock, one of Capitol’s biggest stars who also happens to be a world-class drunk and womanizer, gets kidnapped and held for ransom in the middle of his latest movie, a Biblical epic called, of course, Hail, Caesar! Mannix works to rescue Whitlock, partly out of concern for the man but mostly out of concern for keeping the studio’s most expensive film on schedule. 

 Meanwhile, there are other subplots involving Mannix contemplating taking another job, Scarlett Johanson’s Esther Williams-like character trying to hide her pregnancy under a mermaid tail, and a marble-mouthed cowboy actor getting cast in an urbane drawing room picture.

All of it is fun, all of it looks great and is shot with the Coen brothers’ usual technical perfection.

The problem, and this is a problem for a comedy, is that the film isn’t terribly funny. It’s amusing, it’s pleasant, but it rarely actually makes you laugh. 

What it reminds me of are old fashioned museum recreations. You know, the big windows you look into and you see a mannequin cave man about to throw a spear at a stuffed buffalo? Everything in Hail, Caesar! looks great and is accurate in its historical detail, but ultimately it comes across as a little airless and posed. You know the buffalo is not really in danger. Of course, a kind of deadpan awkwardness is part of the Coen brothers’ schtick, but it works a lot better in many of their other films.

Another part of the problem of Hail, Caesar! is that nothing’s really at stake. Baird Whitlock’s kidnappers turn out to completely harmless and the communism they convert him to lasts for as long as it takes Eddie Mannix to slap it out of him. There are no real stakes and so it’s hard for the story to build any real steam. If you love classic era Hollywood like I do or enjoy seeing 21^st century stars playing dress up as 1950s stars, see Hail, Caesar! But if you are expecting the hilarity of Raising Arizona or the power of No Country For Old Men, wait for the next Coen brothers project. Maybe it will be that sci fi movie we’re all waiting for.

The Revenant

 

You know that person in your life who you respect but don’t really like? He’s really good at what he does, she knows a lot about a lot of things, but when it comes right down to it, you would rather not spend any time with them because you just don’t like them? Yeah, if the movie The Revenant was a person, that’s the person it would be. I can respect it and recognize its technical achievement and even admire certain things about it without liking it much at all. 

The film is very loosely inspired by real events and people. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a real-life trapper and tracker working for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. He guides a group of men collecting animal pelts during the just barely post-Lewis and Clark days of continental exploration.

Glass gets mauled by a grizzly bear when he accidentally gets between it and her cubs. Thanks to a world class special effects team, we get an excruciatingly  believable and detailed view of what it would be like to be attacked by one of the largest and most deadly land mammals on earth.

The conflict of the film lies in that, despite his injuries, Glass doesn’t die. The men are surrounded by natives who want to kill them, and it’s too far and he’s too wounded to be carried out to safety. Three men are left behind to watch over Glass until he expires. But one of them, the villainous Fitzgerald, kills Glass’s son and convinces the other man to flee to safety with him and lie about what happened.

But the word “revenant” means one who returns from the dead and that’s basically what Glass does. He drags himself out of the shallow grave Fitzgerald leaves him in and then crawls, walks, swims, or rides over hundreds of miles of snowy, treacherous, native-filled territory to exact his revenge.

On a technical level, the film is amazing. Some of the elaborate shots and sequences the director, Alejandro Inarritu, pulls off are really impressive. One shot filmed backwards from the mouth of a crashing waterfall and the chase sequence that ends with Hugh Glass and a horse galloping full-blast off a sheer cliff in particular are standouts. Notably, Inarritu shot the whole film using only natural light which is almost unheard of, and he supposedly filmed the whole movie in sequence, meaning they filmed in the order that the events in the film take place. In-sequence filming is notoriously expensive and might explain some of why the film’s budget went from 60 million dollars originally to 135 million dollars by the end.

The film’s technical polish doesn’t compensate for its emotional coldness. It’s hard to care about what happens to the characters really. Innarritu is a remarkably cerebral director and so his films usually elicit “Oh that’s interesting” rather than “I loved it so much.” Plus the film is spiritually bleak. Basically, it suggests we’re all just grubby, sick loners wandering through a hazy wasteland with nothing  more to do than to kill or be killed. There’s no hope, no salvation, not even any satisfaction when Glass finally has his showdown with Fitzgerald. It’s all just more of the same. 

 

DiCaprio does give a very good performance, but it’s mostly successful because of what he doesn’t do which is talk for most of the film. Glass’s throat is slashed and so he can’t speak. This frees Dicaprio from having to use his nasal, adolescent-sounding voice and it allows viewers to focus on his physical performance, which actually works better.

Innarritu makes films for grad students to write about, not really for audiences to enjoy. The film becomes an intellectual game of “spot the resurrection symbol” after a while. Glass emerges from a grave, multiple rivers, a sweat lodge, and even the carcass of a dead horse at one point. I get it, Alejandro. I respect it. I just don’t like it.