Friday Night Movie Club
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Martin Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker have both calledThe Age of InnocenceScorseses most violent film.
Nobody dies in Scorseses 1993 adaptation of Edith Whartons novel, unless you count a couple of offscreen passings.
There are no shootings, knifings, or beatdowns.
No one even gets run over with a carriage or slapped with a glove.
But theres still violence.
May is a lovely but unimaginative young woman: 1870s high-society wife material.
Ellen recognizes a kindred spirit in Newland.
He has a passionate heart.
He loathes the facades and hypocrisies of his class.
Newland and Ellen fall in love and start seeing each other on the sly.
They think nobody knows.
The clock starts ticking.
This thing cant last.
Dare disturb this universe and it will ruin you.
You are marrying someone else.
You will not contrive a reason to visit her.
Forget you met her.
Her voice speaks for the powers that be, with several decades remove.
(Whartons novel was published in 1920, about 50 years after the events it describes.)
The organizing unit in all Scorsese films is the tribe.
They have to be eliminated, violently if necessary.
The Romans tolerate Jesus inLast Temptationup to a point.
The Chinese tolerate the Dalai Lama inKundunup to a point.
The Kansas City Mafia tolerates the feud between Nicky and Ace inCasinoup to a point.
The cauterization of the threat will be described to survivors in bland language that makes the acts more obscene.
Its what it is.
The Irishman.Hes gone, and there was nothing we could do about it.
I suppose because we talked things over yesterday.
Those fans responded by saying that Scorsese had a lot of nerve considering he only made gangster films.
The whole tribe had rallied around his wife, the narrator says.
He was a prisoner in an armed camp, she adds.
His sentence had already been passed, and now he awaits the inevitable.
