Film Reviews

I love this film. Watched it for the third time, and cried for 1.5 hours.

I love this film. Scorsese’s take on Edith Wharton’s 1920 The Age of Innocence is a luscious and deeply moving portrait of love, longing, and repression in fin de siecle America. I first saw this film a few years ago and a couple of images stayed with me—Newland watching Ellen watching the sailboat; the final scene in Paris. On rewatch I found myself deeply moved by the slow unfold of an unactualised love. When I hit the final scene again, I cried.

We follow Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis) who is engaged to the beautiful but naive May Wellard (Winona Ryder). It is a society match, and deemed to be a good choice for all parties. Newland is handsome, wealthy, and has a successful career in law. May is beautiful, dutiful and from a good aristocratic background. Over the course of the film we see Archer and May come together in the ways such matches bring people together. They organise parties, rouse the relatives to society games, and start to plan out their lives.

Newland comes to doubt his commitments when May’s cousin, Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York following her split from what seems like a disastrous marriage to a Polish count. Ellen is everything May is not: interesting, outspoken, and unconventional. Ellen’s life experience, and the way she rejects the New Yorker’s social conventions attracts Newland—the part of Newland that challenges conformity and that he keeps hidden from those in his set. Newland and Ellen begin a doomed flirtation.

What unfolds is a depressing meditation on restraint, manners and emotion. Newland and Ellen fall deeper in love, but are unable to act on their emotions. There are moments throughout the film where Newland hesitates, always on the cusp of acting on how he feels. When he sees Ellen in Washington he gives himself one moment when he may approach her, but only if she turns to him first. She doesn’t, so he walks away. Newland grapples with societal expectation, his marriage, and the deep attraction he feels towards Ellen. He is never truly courageous with his love. Ellen seems to feel this and pulls away from him—first by moving to Washington, and then returning to Europe.

Both Ellen and Newland feel, to varying effects, the weight of the coming scandal should he break off his relationship with May to truly pursue Ellen. And one of the film’s remarkable feats is making the audience feel this too. The atmosphere of the film is claustrophobic. The set pieces take place at the Opera, where society watches each other as much as they watch the show. Or there are scenes in overly crowded Victorian drawing rooms, so filled with art and flowers and ornaments that there barely seems to be room to breathe. The uneasy sense of crowded isolation and permanent observation is atmospheric. This is a society so permeating and all knowing that it is hard to break from. And New York’s cruelty is underscored throughout. We’re told that the society people communicate only in unsubtle gestures of acceptance and rejection. They can act on mass to send obvious and hurtful messages. When surrounded by that kind of threat how can someone ever truly self actualise?

Day Lewis and Pfeiffer are excellent as Newland and Ellen, giving off a suppressed but simmering horny chemistry throughout. There are a couple of hot make-outs in the film, and at one point Day Lewis kisses Pfeiffer’s foot. But the film feels sexy. The barely contained lust, and the danger of their relationship make for anxious but compelling viewing. The magnetism of the two leads is part of what makes their relationship compelling. I could feel their draw to each other throughout the film, and I was rooting for their relationship. It feels so clear that these are two people who are intensely, intimately connected to each other. And together they could build a kind of life together that would take them far from the increasingly moribund manners of gilded age New York. The floundering of their relationship—Newland’s lack of courage, society’s destructive straight-jacket—feels genuinely tragic even though it never really gets going.

And I felt for both Newland and Ellen throughout. Love can feel enormous, because it is. Sometimes it comes too late in our lives, after we have written cheques we have to cash. Newland could have left May close to the start of the film, and maybe have attempted to weather the scandal. But once May reveals to him that she is pregnant he has no option to stay with her as a dutiful husband and father. He is too aware that his abandonment would taint May, her family, and her children. And this, really, is the ‘violence’ of the film that Scorsese has referenced in interviews. A set of codes that forces us to give up happiness, because actualising our own needs and desires will leave someone else ruined and alone. It is bad enough to realise you’re unable to share your life with someone you thought could make you happy. It is so much more crushing when the option is laced with true destruction.

I'm glad I saw this film, but I found it disappointing. The film is shot beautifully, and Daniel Craig gives a touching and raw performance as William Burroughs. Craig's ability to be pitifully yearning, for drugs and a boy named Eugene, really shook me and I felt the tenderness behind his half-hearted bravado at every turn.

Queer does a good job of interrogating the anxiety disembodiedness that can come with being queer. The way that feelings of marginalisation leave you rootless, and get in the way of connecting with other people. Burroughs' relationship with Eugene feels plainly transactional, but Craig's Burroughs can't see it. He chases Eugene for sex, and for some semblance of intimacy but never really forms a true connection. Burroughs has dramatic outburst after dramatic outburst: frustration getting the better of him, and his disconnectedness from the world around him bubbling up time and time again.

But, ultimately, this film left me somewhat cold. It didn't quite feel queer enough to justify the title. Eugene disappears just before the final act and although there's some poetry in him vanishing without explanation, I wanted to know why and it didn't feel truly earned by his relationship with Burroughs. The parts of the plot that centred on the chase for ayahuasca I felt just got in the way of what could have been a well developed drama between Eugene and Burroughs. Although, junkie/queer parallels were well observed.

Perhaps the highlight was seeing Craig give full throat goat energy. Compelling.