Winona Ryder @ 50: "The Age of Innocence"
Tuesday, October 26, 2021 at 7:00PM 
It didn't take long for Winona Ryder to capture the Academy's attention. In 1990, Mermaids marked the young actress' first brush with awards buzz, and, three years later, The Age of Innocence cashed in on that promise. For playing May Welland, the fiancée, then wife, of Daniel Day-Lewis' Newland Archer, Winona Ryder was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and probably came quite close to winning. She won the Golden Globe and Anna Paquin's win at the Oscars for The Piano was considered a surprise at the time. And yet, reading reviews from the time and even modern considerations, it's clear that Ryder's performance isn't as universally beloved as her victories might imply. Indeed, it's divisive work…
Adapted from Edith Wharton's 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence is an agonizing picture, full of searing cruelties beneath the façade of Gilded Age finery. Scorsese claimed it as his most violent picture, a curious description that feels true instead of emptily provocative. The story details how Newland Archer, a young, well-off attorney from a good family, falls in love with Michelle Pfeiffer's Countess Ellen Olenska, an American girl returned home to escape an unhappy European marriage. She's the cousin of his fiancée, May, whose loveliness is a well-known fact of 1870s upper-crust New York society. Described by Warthon as a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper, this is a realm of frustration and savage decorum.
Propriety, here, is so unbending it denies humanity itself. The order of such a milieu demands that the real thing is left unsaid at all times. In the extremes, it may not even be thought, only represented by a set of arbitrary signs. Language and conversation are a hieroglyphic matter in The Age of Innocence, successions of pretty pictures that portent hidden meanings and put forward a visual splendor with little to no relation to what's actually going on inside a person's mind, their soul. Conversation can be dangerous too, warfare of verbiage and euphemisms that are as merciless as any of Scorsese's gangsters with their guns and murderous schemes.
The camerawork takes an almost scientific interest in all the meticulous performances and accessories of society. While the historically accurate design recalls the splendor of Visconti's period films, Scorsese doesn't approach the past as an insider or immerse you as a spectator. Instead, the director invites the viewer to share his curiosity and investigate, catalog, devour every detail. It's ravenous filmmaking, the camera made into a hungry eye that wants everything. Nevertheless, that same hunger seems to dissipate whenever May's the subject of its gaze. Like Newland, the screen appears to believe there's nothing more to the young woman beyond her attractive surface.
May's innocent to a fault, or so she is perceived by all around her. Indeed, her fiancé sees her as little more than a symbol of all the good things their wealthy world promised. She's the best of them, and yet, the hypocrisies of the Gilded Age high society have not forgotten her – not that Newland notices. The narrator makes evident how much the male lead undermines May in his interior thought, how he takes her at face value and fails to conceptualize that something exists beneath her surface. To the man, his public beloved is a porcelain doll, a painting of inexpressive girlishness where deep feeling coexists with a dispiriting absence of imagination.
At one point, we're told he believes May doesn't procure emancipation for the simple fact she doesn't realize she's not free. Furthermore, the narration underlines the alienation Newland feels from his betrothed. Suspecting her niceness is a curtain drawn over an essential emptiness, he fails to see beyond its velvety occlusion and thinks himself knowing of what lies behind it. In a horrid instance, the narration reveals Newland wishes her death so that he can be set free. But what if what's hidden away by the metaphorical curtain is despair as profound as that felt by Ellen and Newland? Tied to the male perspective, we're led to share or believe his opinion of May, not realizing how deluded we also are.
Scorsese makes us underestimate her, better to surprise with the revelation of her actual complexity. For Ryder, such dynamics represent a treacherous challenge, for she must uphold her director's illusory game while also building the discreet foundations of May's true self. Nevertheless, she's not without humor. Notice the smiles the young woman tries to trade with Archer as she converses with the individual her cousin described as one of the dullest men in the world. In another scene, there's a glint of sublimated sincerity in her jokey suggestion of elopement. The delivery may denote an attempt at amusing Newland, but the expectancy shining in her eyes reveals that there may be truth in jest. The man, as ever, ignores her subtleties.
The Age of Innocence is one of many early 1990s period pieces in which casting directors inserted Ryder despite her utter inability to convey the physicality of anyone but a late 20th-century twenty-something. That's not a dig at the actress, merely an acknowledgment of how she reads on film. Even here, dressed in Gabriella Pescucci's Oscar-winning historical costumes, she feels disruptively modern in affect and poise. There's none of Pfeiffer's tremulous repression nor Day-Lewis' aloof cerebral nature in Ryder's performance. Even so, that's more feature than a bug since it electrifies May with a sense of wrongness, making her stick out like a sore thumb when everything in the movie indicates she should be the most indistinguishable of high society's pretty girls.
It's a masterstroke of weird casting that signals itself right when we first see May, and her smile is too wide to be polite, overstated, and almost childish in its enthusiasm. It'd be an object of cringe if not for how mechanical its deployment becomes, leaving a strong taste of calculation long after the flavor of fake naivete has dissipated. As it happens, in this tale of self-deception and the dictatorship of propriety, May's innocence is the biggest lie of all. It's not that she's corrupted by this cosmos of pseudo-aristocratic New World wealth. Instead, she's a realist, a social creature that may fail to see anything beyond the cage she's learned to live in, a gilded construction whose enclosure is as comfortable as it is stifling.
Newland and May have more in common than they might realize. They're both awake and aware of their cages. In the end, though, they chose to stay inside and be as hypocritical as all their peers. If she has to force his hand a tiny bit, so be it. It's only right after the illicit lovers nurse their yearning and taste the ambrosia of forbidden love, making May watch, understand all and say nothing about it. Her silence is not ignorance but strategy. When revealing her pregnancy at a pivotal moment, May wields the good news as a weapon, chilling us with the coldness of someone who knows they've imprisoned someone forevermore. It's not cruelty, per se, but the restless last action of a woman who sees catastrophe on the horizon and does everything in her power to avoid that fate.
Framed, for the first time, as a menacing force, Ryder understates her purposes, contradicting the demonstrative force of her early smiles. Perhaps realizing how these final moments are the movie's most painful scenes, she lets the significance of May's actions speak for itself, words wrapping around Newland's heart and crushing it even while she pities the man. It's the closest the performance ever comes to an Oscar scene and what makes it so unique is how Ryder holds back. It's how she persists inside May's façade, only showing enough for us to acknowledge, at long last, that she's been the most perceptive person in the film all along, maybe even the most complex. It's brilliant work, easily dismissible because of how perfectly Winona Ryder portrays a woman thought by all to be an empty ornament.
up next: Another Oscar nomination, for Little Women (1994)
Reader Comments (12)
I do love this film and man... Winona I thought was on her A game and really elevated herself as I felt for her character.
I adore this performance, and don't know how I would have voted that oscar year (Paquin and Perez are dynamite, too.)
It's all about that last scene - plunging that dagger in such a luminously passive aggressive way.
Agreed on her last scene - it's horrifyingly effective. One thing that struck me on a recent rewatch is how the quality of Winona's smile changes over the course of the movie. In the beginning, yes, it's a bit much, but it does register as genuine. It's fascinating in kind of a heartbreaking way to observe just how much more calculated it becomes as May fights for her turf.
This is one of my favorite Scorsese films. It's so beautifully shot and it's a terrific adaptation of the book (also a masterpiece). It always leaves me feeling conflicted about Newland, because while I think we're supposed to be sympathetic to him (and I am, though more so for the ladies), it's also constantly telegraphing how unreliable his perspective is, *especially* when it comes to May. If I'm being honest, while I do feel badly for everyone involved in the triangle, I also can't help feeling a perverse admiration for how deftly May outmaneuvers and checkmates the husband who insists on seeing her as a simple girl. Underestimate her at your peril!
I can never think about this film without thinking of Miriam Margolyes and how she would have been nominated if 'Winona Ryder had submitted herself as a lead actress' and that she DOESN'T like her :D
I enjoyed reading this.
Ryder is good but she was doomed when TAOI didn't score the top nods no Pfeiffer was an error but Paquin deserved it.
Wish you'd write a review of the 'movie that could've been' had the overworked Winona agreed to appear in The Godfather Part 3. I'll re-watch that movie at times and insert Ryder into the Mary scenes.
One of Scorsese’s very best films! I love Winona in this. It’s such a sly performance and I totally agree that she manages to turn what should be bugs/problems into assets.
@TOM- this is way she was cast in Dracula. Francis Ford Coppola still wanted to work with her and made sure she was available for this movie.
thevoid99 -- It's curious how much I've started to empathize with her character, more with each re-watch. I think it's a really good performance that's unfairly maligned in some circles.
Mike in Canada -- That last scene is aces!
Lynn Lee -- You're so right about her smile, though I'm not sure that's an acting technique or a consequence of framing and staging, maybe even how Ryder contextualizes it within the rest of her performance. It's terrifying considering how the effusiveness of the beginning turns into something menacing when we see her get up from her seat next to Countess Olenska and walk directly to Newland, her gaze fixed on the camera. It's almost a horror movie moment from his perspective. Btw, I too understand that admiration for May - she proved to be the most masterful social chess player of all, while everyone underestimated her.
morganb123 -- I love that Margolies Graham Norton moment, though I must disagree with her. Ryder's supporting campaign was fair.
Mr Ripley79 -- Paquin's a great winner.
TOM -- I must revisit THE GODFATHER PART III now that there's a new cut around. Maybe I'll like it more this time around.
thefilmjunkie -- I wish people talked more about THE AGE OF INNOCENCE when discussing Scorsese's best movies. But then, I think his greatest work is NEW YORK, NEW YORK so I'm aware my taste's a bit weird in regards to him.
TomG -- As much as love Winona Ryder, her work in DRACULA leaves a lot to be desired. Adore the costumes though, and she makes for a good model.
Much as I admire this film, Winona kinda ruined it for me at the time. I recall some comments she made basically pooh-poohing her work in the period pieces (this and Dracula among others), as she was very aware of how contemporary she came across. I lost some respect for her as an actress as a result, although I thought she did some solid work in The Crucible (another costume drama).
Didn't care for her performance at the time, but it is one that has improved upon repeated viewings. It's difficult to shine with this type of character and in a film with Michelle Pfeiffer. We know who's going to get the attention!
It's nice seeing Alexis Smith in her final role, however small it is. She was an actress that really found her footing as she got older. But then again, she was offered more varied parts as an older actress than the decorative parts in frequently poor scripts that came her way as a young leading lady.
Ryder's performance is my favorite part of TAOI. Wharton writes about May's eyes being "wet with victory" and my God does Ryder capture that perfectly in her last scene. Just beautiful work.