The Age of Innocence - Scorsese's Sunset

'Humankind cannot bear very much reality.' (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets)

'In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs'. (Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence)

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The ending to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence has always struck me as perfect. Likewise, the close to Martin Scorsese's big-screen adaptation, with Daniel Day Lewis's Newland Archer choosing not to rekindle his love affair with the long-absent Countess Ellen Olenska. Sitting on a bench, gazing up at a fifth-floor window, Archer steadily paints a picture in his head of the scene in the room occupied by the Countess, who is anticipating his presence. As Wharton tells it: 

    Then he tried to see the persons already in the room - for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one - and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half-rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it.... He thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on the table. 

    "It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other. 

    He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters. 

    At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and waked back alone to his hotel. 

Rewatching the film, and rereading certain key passages in the book, I find that I've changed my mind. It is a young man's ending, and youth's arrogant certainty that opportunity is infinite, is easily dismissed when you are closing in on your sixth decade. Archer should have climbed the stairs and faced his romantic past, testing it against the fading of the light.   

Archer, though, is also a young man's hero. Or rather a sentimental young man's idea of what an ageing, aesthete hero is. Archer has little interest in reality and prefers the stilled tableaux to the mobile and mutable. 'It's more real to me here than if I went up' he says. Interesting that Scorsese jettisons this line, choosing instead to rerun a key scene from earlier in the film - the Lime Rock Lighthouse moment - flashing it up on the screen, as if it is stealing suddenly into Archer's consciousness. Writing this moment out, I sense that it sounds heavy-handed and didactic. But watching it back again, it's wonderful. Daniel Day Lewis's face, first produces the kind of half-smile that you might wear when facing a beautiful but melancholy piece of art - as if he's taking his own brush and adding those azaleas to the table that he has placed behind her - and then the smile clouds as he lifts himself from the bench, and with the aid of a stick limps slowly to the end of the street and around the corner. 

And what of that earlier setting sun moment at the Lime Rock Lighthouse? Archer, stepping out from his holiday home and leaving his fiancée May on the premise of a postprandial stroll, sets out in search of the Countess who he finds gazing out across a bay towards the Lime Rock Lighthouse. 'Archer stopped at the sight as if he had waked from sleep. That vision of the past was a dream, and the reality was what awaited him in the house'. Wharton's words are explicit, that even in his youthful prime, Archer regards his grande amoure has belonging to the past. Nevertheless, there's a moment of equivocation. He makes a little bet with himself, as a boat nudges across the water. 

    "She doesn't know - she hasn't guessed. Shouldn't I know if she came up behind me, I wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he said to himself: "If she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go back." 

Again, maturity has caused me to reevaluate Scorsese's interpretation of Wharton. There's something jarring about Scorcese's sunset here (do watch the clip in full). It shimmers in a way that is awkward and inauthentic and I'm left thinking of that phrase 'chocolate-box' which gets attached to certain nineteenth century artists. Sure enough, Renoir - often the unfair target of accusations of kitsch - has painted the perfect example of what I'm getting at, albeit excluding the film's parasoled maiden.  

Renoir's Sunset At Sea (1879)

But that's only half the story. I think this saccharine-sweet visual is deliberate and Scorsese is allowing us a glimpse into the essence of Archer's character. The Countess will not turn - although we do later learn that she is very aware of his presence - and Archer will make his way back to the safety of his fiancée. The image will remain - like an adored painting - fixed in his memory, unruffled by anything as contingent and vulgar as reality. 

To muddy things further for Archer, I have a solid recollection of the Lime Rock Lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island. Back in 1996 I'd eaten brunch opposite it with an ex-girlfriend and her ageing grandmother. I double-checked, and indeed, the real lighthouse - a short, squat building - is very different from Scorsese's classically heroic one. Archer's mind's eye cannot bear too much reality.        

Art and paintings are very much to the fore in Wharton's novel, and Scorsese does not flinch in making exquisite use of it in the film, and often - an auteur's prerogative - bringing his own considered choices to the proceedings. In fact, almost all of the two hundred paintings in the film are high quality reproductions, adding over $200,000 to the budget. That would make for a whole book, but I'll focus on just two select examples. I love the use of James Tissot's narratively busy canvases in the lead up to the Beaufort's Annual Opera Ball. In particular, Too Early is worth looking out for, a sly sneer at those committing the ultimate faux pas of punctuality. That much of Wharton's ire is aimed at the rigidity of old world manners and social codes - ones that Archer condemns but, alas, not enough to deviate from - adds a beautiful irony to the mix.          

James Tissot's Too Early (1873)

It almost seems like a missed opportunity that a key rendezvous between Archer and the Countess in the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art didn't make it into Scorsese's vision. Wharton's Archer escorts the Countess into the bowels of the Museum, towards a room where the 'Cesnola antiquities mouldered in unvisited loneliness' - indeed, as far back into the artistic past as possible, amidst the mummies and sarcophagi - betraying his fixation with everything that has passed. I might be alone in my harshness here, but Archer has much more in common with George Eliot's dry and desiccated Edward Causabon than with the dashing yet thwarted romantic hero. 

But to return to the art that does make it. Scorsese does not miss the boat in his use of my favourite Turner painting. My very first blog post outlined how Daniel Craig's ageing James Bond was symbolically scuttled by The Fighting Temeraire. It seems that director Sam Mendes might have been paying close attention to Scorsese. Archer passes the painting as he goes about the protracted business of choosing his pregnant wife over the Countess. The irony is clear: like HMS Temeraire, despite the title, he is no longer fighting.  

J M W Turner's The Fighting Temeraire (1838)

The greatest sunset in art - messy not idealised - is behind him. Archer is not yet thirty and his romantic race is run. A palpable hit, no doubt about it. But that's exactly how he likes it: a quiet, contemplative life, static, beautiful and untroubled. In truth, the sun had set much earlier, halfway through the book and halfway through the film.  

    The boat was gliding out on the receding tide. It slid before the Lime Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house and passed across the turret in which the light was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not move. 

    He turned and walked up the hill.