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)