The Age Of Innocence (1993)

Saw The Age Of Innocence (1993), a sumptuous period film about a lawyer in 1800s New York who gets caught in a love triangle.  Should he settle down with his fiancé who is very sweet but seemingly nothing else, or should he jump ship and take up with the countess who is scandalous and penniless but who he connects with better on a human level?  This being a work of fiction, it is clear what the right choice is, but the deck is stacked with respectability and comfort and friends and family who want to ensure a smooth household.

The film is gorgeous.  It's set in period drawing rooms lavished with oil paintings and populated by characters swaddled in stiff, regal clothing.  Scenes gently fade in and out.  Even when the film wants to convey intense emotion, it does so with a focused pinhole shot, spot-lighting one of the character's eyes or something.  It's very old-fashioned, very classy.  Keeping with the aura of class and restraint, it is a little too slow and a little too quiet at times.  It's like having a meal at one of those restaurants that uses a square foot of white ceramic to serve you a small piece of pate.  The feelings are intense, but very buried under restrained performances and dialogue which gently hints and suggests what it means to say.

I was hoping for a little more hysterics and melodrama, but it's more restrained than that.  It reminds me of Titanic, but without a flashy ship-wreck scene in the climax, of course.  It wound up being mostly terribly sad in the end, showing how a desire for conformity and respectability damages all of us alike, but at the same time not throwing the fancy upper-class folks under the bus too much.

I didn't like the film as much as I'd hoped.  It was a little too restrained and period for my taste and the acting was so understated I had to sort of work to continue to care about the characters, but it was very classy, very fancy.  It felt like the sort of thing you'd claim to want to watch to impress your parents or your in-laws.  Like a visit to Granny's house, it's kind of old and pokey, but resonant and nice too.