[In the following excerpt, Klawans complains that after an artful and exciting opening sequence, The Age of Innocence becomes a flat costume drama, directed with none of Scorsese's characteristic flair.]

I wish Martin Scorsese [in his The Age of Innocence] had understood that the characters in Edith Wharton's books are just a bunch of Italians, like the rest of us. Maybe they eat turtle soup at dinner and have their gowns shipped transatlantic from Worth; but hypocrisy is still hypocrisy and illicit passion still elevates the pulse, even for those living in The Age of Innocence. Wharton, who knew from experience about hypocrisy and its effect on the adrenal gland, wrote that book at least partly as revenge, mocking those upright old New Yorkers who once had kept her trapped in the padded cells of their drawing rooms. If you go to see the film version—and of course you will, if you care at all about the state of American culture—you will get the full effect only when Joanne Woodward reads excerpts of Wharton's prose on the soundtrack. She doesn't adopt the plummy tones and English stage manner that usually go with such recitations; her vowels are flat and twangy and emphatically American, her timbre dry. She guides you expertly through all the twists and turns of Wharton's periods, making you feel the rasp at the end of this phrase, the stinging laugh at the end of another. She roughs up the characters, just talking about them. But Scorsese? He's almost deferential, as if those stiffs from Fifth Avenue were somehow better than a boy from Elizabeth Street.

Actually, Scorsese kicks off the film in his best form, perhaps because he's pretending, just for a few minutes, that the story is about Italians after all. The scene is the Academy of Music on the season's opening night. Gounod's Faust is being played onstage; in the stalls and boxes, intrigue is afoot. The camera roams everywhere. Faust and Marguerite dizzily change places with Wharton's characters, as Scorsese leads your eye up and around the soprano, out over the audience, back into the corridor of the opera house, around to the box where May Welland (Winona Ryder) sits with her notorious cousin, Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). As the operatic and social performances merge, you might recall having seen such a sequence before—in the beginning of Luchino Visconti's Senso. There's a similar spirit in the director's lush reconstruction of nineteenth-century peacockery, in the exuberant fluidity of his camera movement and editing, in the whiff of something corrupt and futile hidden behind all that busy spectacle. An ingenious conceit, and one that's admirably suited to Scorsese's talents: In order to portray Wharton's New York of the 1870s, start by thinking of Visconti's Venice of the 1860s.

Unfortunately, that's only the start. As the plot takes hold, in a version redacted by Scorsese and Jay Cocks, the film settles into a sedate rhythm of shot/countershot dialogue; of prettified, long-shot vistas alternating with close-ups of stuffy interiors; of restrained, discreet tracking shots broken up by fussy little montage essays on the lighting of a cigar or the laying out of a dinner service. The style becomes as repressed as the characters themselves and is then capped by a further repression of the lead actors. It's true that Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) are both doomed to suffer nobly; but they couldn't do it if they had to spend the whole day sighing, like Scorsese's hapless performers.

Archer, after all, demands that his fiancée, May Welland, marry him now, because he can feel he's going to take somebody to bed, and if it isn't his proper little intended, it surely will be the improper Madame Olenska. What troubled seas of testosterone must be rising in him, the skies above them sulfurously illuminated by flashes of nervous rage! And yet society decrees that his skin must be a cold, taut membrane, holding back the storm without a hint of strain. Even his eyes aren't supposed to betray the lightning within. Day-Lewis could play all that. He could play it as readily as Scorsese could direct four guys in a bar in Little Italy. I assume, then, that Day-Lewis goes through the movie murmuring and making soft, uncertain gestures because Scorsese told him to. It's the only plausible explanation—which also may account for the way this keenly intelligent actor recites his lines as if they'd been learned by rote in a foreign language.

As Ellen Olenska, the woman who has lived in sin-ridden Europe and now dares to dream of getting a divorce, Michelle Pfeiffer has never seemed more candid or vulnerable. Scorsese and his great cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, make the most of her big moist eyes, set in that open expanse of pale and infinitely fragile skin; you'd almost think the surface of her face was a photographic emulsion, ready to capture even the subtlest emotions with a flicker of light. You look at her and marvel at the delicacy of this creation; and yet Olenska is "used to a little higher seasoning," as someone says of another of Wharton's heroines. She's had a pretty high time of it in Europe and is being portrayed by an actress who can handle Catwoman. Here, not a meow. The only visible hint of wildness that Scorsese allows her is an advanced collection of paintings. It's as if this most expressive of contemporary American directors had knowingly committed the fault that critics impute (often wrongly) to James Ivory: letting the production designer do the actors' work.

None of this means that The Age of Innocence is a failure. In a sense, Scorsese has reached the stage at which there can be no complete failures, since everything he makes has relevance to his career. But just because he's so central to American filmmaking today, Scorsese ought to set off some alarms with this picture. Why should he have treated Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska as if they were porcelain dolls, when before he wasn't afraid to put his hands even on Jesus? What made Scorsese hold back?

The answer, I suppose, is that he's following the first law of show business: Give the people what they want. The pretty-sunset era has returned, and so Scorsese (no doubt gritting his teeth) will give us pretty sunsets, may we enjoy them forever in hell. During the 1980s, Reaganoid optimism seemed to engender a countervailing grotesquerie in the arts, especially among painters and filmmakers and writers who were themselves Reaganoids. (Think of David Lynch and Tom Wolfe.) The results were not necessarily good art, but they served as good cover for someone like Scorsese, with his sense of sin and creatural obsessions. Today, though, Scorsese stands exposed in a landscape of pitiless, unrelenting niceness. He makes Cape Fear—ostensibly a commercial project—and it turns out to be art. Worse still, it's the wrong kind of art. The audience wants Howard's End (at best) or Like Water for Chocolate (I withhold comment). Can we blame him, then, for making his next picture so decorous, so dreamy, so dull?

I hope Scorsese makes a fortune on The Age of Innocence and wins fifteen Academy Awards. And then, I hope, he'll sit down and think once more about the book. Like much of the best American literature of its era, The Age of Innocence suggests that it might not be such a bad thing to follow your instincts. May Scorsese go back to following his.