Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis in The Age of Innocence (photo: 2.bp.blogspot.com)

The Age of Innocence must be really over, as it’s a little hard to sit through. Watched the 1993 movie of Edith Wharton’s classic (read it free here) over the weekend (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, directed by Martin Scorsese (trailer). Miriam Margolyes’s portrayal of the grandmother with her—was it five?—ever-present fluffy lapdogs was terrific. Credits were beautiful, sets and costumes the same. Some family discussion here about whether I’d seen this movie before, and I thought not. Remembered nothing until the final scene.

Not much happens on the surface in this story of repressed passion (though I’d nominate Henry James’s The Golden Bowl—at 632 pages—for the all-time “not much happens” award), and it could happen a lot quicker. You know where the story’s going from your first glimpse of Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer) at the opera—Faust, by the way, the very definition of temptation. Wharton’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, an emblem of how tastes change.

Nevertheless, the photography, sets, and people are so beautiful, they’re fun to watch . . . for a while. Perhaps Scorsese wanted to do something totally different than Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, and didn’t quite know where to stop the pendulum. Still, at the time, he said it was the “most violent” film he’d ever made. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating, 80 percent.