In Martin Scorsese's film The Age of Innocence (1993), Edith Wharton's novel is the source for a story about a time very different form our own. The Age of innocence referred to in the title was over long before Wharton wrote her book, and by the term she means the latter part of the nineteenth century when the richest families in New York intermarried and controlled the social milieu in a variety of ways while enforcing a certain vision of social mores and behavior. The film is set in the 1870s, and the tightly-knit upper-class community in New York city enforces morality by gossip, so that anyone who becomes the object of gossip is scandalized and perhaps ostracized from the group. Personal desires and needs matter less than the cohesion of the group. The cinematic style of this film evokes the sumptuousness of this wealthy class and evokes a sense of the time and place very well. Scorsese develops his themes through the use of understatement, creating strong tensions between characters while doing so by showing how well these individuals keep these tensions in check. This is not a world where people's emotions are expressed openly--it is rather a world where emotions are kept inside as much as possible and where keeping others from knowing what you feel is vital. Scorsese uses controlled camerawork and careful composition to depict a society in which outward form matters more than inner turmoil, at least as far as society is concerned. In the end, it is a film about loss as people let go of what they want most because society would disapprove if they acted otherwise.
The opening of the film is marked in the credit sequence by an irony that colors the remainder of the film. The image that repeats in that opening is of flowers opening, and this image of flowering is something that brings to mind verbal images about the flowering of the human spirit and the flowering of life. The organic image is of life, free and unhind...