The Age of Innocence

The translation of a book into a motion picture can be a difficult process and is made all the more difficult when the screenwriters feel the need to maintain respect for the structure of the book, for its characterizations, and for its themes. This is why it is usually believed that less literary works are more easily translated, while well-respected literary works present many problems because the author has already presented his or her story in a dense and complex way that marries form and content. The form of a film is quite different from that of a novel, utilizing images rather than imagery, pictures instead of words, actions instead of descriptions, and so on. the recent film production of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is an example in which the filmmakers--director Martin Scorsese and screenwriters Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks--hew very closely to the original book and find ways to use the language of film as a shorthand to convey the time and place of the novel, to telescope sequences, to illuminate characterizations without altering them, and generally to produce a visual representation of the book. At the same tim, though, the two experiences are very different, and the film cannot by any means supplant the book or its literary effects, nor does it try to do so.

The fact that the film will follow the book closely is indicated in the opening sequence, which in both book and film is a singing concert at the Academy of Music in New York in the 1870s. T

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ont. The visual style of the film evokes the themes and mood of the novel quite well. Both novel and film make similar tantalizing use of Countess Olenska. The novel presents her at the Opera and then removes her from the scene as others talk about her and her supposed indiscretions. The film does the same, with shots of Archer apparently seeking her at the Beauforts and then meeting her later at another grand party. Nearly every moment of the film scene is taken directly from the book, from the entrance to the van der Luyden's to the moment when Mrs. van der Luyden "rescues" Archer from the Countess and complements May from across the room. Scene after scene in the film shows the same fidelity to the written word, with those aspects of the novel, the asides and underlying comments, which cannot be visualized clearly brought to life through the "voice" that narrates the action from beginning to end. At the end of the scene in the van der Luyden home, Wharton writes: He was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she added, as if condescending to his natural shyness: "I've never seen May looking lovelier. The duke thinks her the handsomest girl in the room" (Wharton 66). The scene ends similarly in the film, and the acto

Category: Film - T