daniel day-lewis

The Age of Innocence (1993)

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The period-piece romance The Age of Innocence is never the first title that comes to mind in discussions of Martin Scorsese’s work, nor even the tenth. After a long career defined by stories of Catholic faith, brutal violence, and the mafia, the name Scorsese usually conjures crime-thriller titles like GoodFellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman, not his adaptation of a Gilded Age romance novel by Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence is not all that extreme of an outlier within his larger catalog, though, at least not in terms of theme. Despite first appearances, it is a quintessential Martin Scorsese picture, in that it’s a distinctly New York story about violent passion & conspiracy. It’s also immediately recognizable as one of his very best, calling into question whether his career would’ve been improved if he were diverted into only directing the American equivalent of Merchant-Ivory costume dramas instead of sticking to his typical crisis-of-faith & organized-crime stories.

The plot is centered on a love-triangle scandal in 19th Century NYC, in which a young, ambitious lawyer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is distracted from his impending marriage to a naive socialite (Winona Ryder) by the arrival of her disgraced, free-spirited cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), to whom he is a better-suited romantic match. While helping the cousin break free from an abusive marriage to a European nobleman without stumbling into the public scandal of divorce, the lawyer falls into obsessive, feverish love with her without even noticing his transgression. Everyone around the forbidden couple notices, however, even if the organized gossip network of NYC society would never speak such sin aloud in mixed company. The result is a competition between two simultaneous conspiracies: one in which the potentially adulterous lovers believe they are discreetly indulging in their shared passion without notice, and a larger one in which their city-wide social circle closes ranks to shut their emotional affair down for good before it has a chance to become physical. The shock of the story is in learning just how active the younger, performatively dim fiancée is within the conspiracy to nip the affair in the bud, which is the kind of last-minute reveal that makes you want to immediately rewatch from the beginning through a new lens — the highest compliment that can be paid to any movie.

All of the passion, yearning, and unspoken political maneuvering of the story is inherited from its literary source material, with Scorsese going as far as to preserve the beauty of Wharton’s prose in a constant narration track from Joanne Woodward. He makes his presence known in the visual language, though, pulling influence from infamously showy, experimental directors in his mental cinematic encyclopedia. He employed Saul Bass for the opening credits sequence—time-elapsed flowers blooming in double exposure over vintage lace—sharing a core collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock. Full-screen flashes of white, yellow, and red express the violent passion of his characters in direct allusion to François Truffaut. Stuttered montage of opera-house audiences recalls the crude, tactile animation of Stan Brakhage. The opera theatre itself—the grandest temple of New York social life—is shot with the erratic, swooping verve of Argento’s Opera. Longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is equally aggressive in the editing room, overwhelming the audience with insert shots of extravagant meals & tobacco-smoking instruments in fetishistic detail. The director even physically inserts himself into the picture in a single-scene cameo as a portrait photographer, again recalling the legend & legacy of Hitchcock. He is respectful of Wharton’s source text, but he’s not delicate with it.

Even without Scorsese’s technical bravado intensifying the breathy dialogue exchanges, The Age of Innocence would still register as a cut above most of the literary dramas that rack up easy Best Costume Design Oscars year to year. The central cast is phenomenal, with Winona Ryder weaponizing her appearance of naivety to devastating effect, Michelle Pfeiffer causing havoc as the only member of New York Society who dares to speak & live honestly, and Daniel Day-Lewis showing a softer, more vulnerable side of himself before his wayward yearning transforms him into one of the violently passionate freaks he usually plays. His own naivety is neither cultivated nor performative, as he believes he is keeping his sinful desires hidden from the public while comparing the idea of his would-be lover returning to her marriage as a sentence worse than death & Hell in Byronic hyperbole. He never allows himself to fully consummate his lust, but the small ways he indulges it is somehow more sexual than actual sex — sneaking kisses to her wrists, her slippers, and her parasol as if those sneaky micro-transgressions could go possibly go unnoticed. The other two corners of the central love triangle are equally strong, but all of the passion, pain, and betrayal of the story is clearly visible in his dark, burning eyes, a reminder that he used to be one of the best actors in the world before he became an unlikely fashionista.

One of Wharton’s most clever lines preserved here is Pfeiffer’s observation that “all of the blind obeying of traditions, somebody else’s traditions” in New York society is self-defeating, since “it seems stupid to have discovered America only it make it a copy of another country.” All of the rules about virtue, propriety, fashion, and divorce that keep the central trio locked in a social prison of their own design are leftover from the social values of upper-class Europe. An entirely new world is being actively built around them, while they insist in living by the rules of an old one. Scorsese appears to be operating in a temporal limbo between old & new worlds here as well, gazing slack-jawed at the gorgeous oil-painting galleries & soaring architecture of the story’s Gilded Age setting while also brazenly distorting the visual aesthetics of the era through his own distinctly 1990s style. Both the romance of the picture and the auteur behind it are torn in two by the conflicting interests of tradition & passion. In that way, the seemingly incongruous marriage of filmmaker & genre is exactly what makes The Age of Innocence so remarkably great. It’s almost enough to make you wonder what would happen if Julian Fellows were making a hyperviolent organized-crime saga instead of coasting on Downton Abbey fumes with The Gilded Age.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1988’s Torch Song Trilogy, is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York.  The film’s greatest accomplishments lie less in its queer political advocacy than they lie in its dramatic approximation of a full, authentic life for Fierstein’s protagonist – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones.  By all accounts, the original stage play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation.  One of the producers’ only contractual obligations for Fierstein’s screenplay was that the movie could be no longer than two hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for four.  Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.

Torch Song Trilogy was unique but not alone in its no-big-deal dramatization of everyday gay life for a 1980s audience.  In general, independent filmmaking was a relatively robust industry in that era, which means there were plenty of gay filmmakers in that era who were eager to flesh out representation for their own demographic on the big screen.  If you’re curious to see other 1980s dramas about gay life in the big city, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Buddies (1985)

Torch Song Trilogy is notably one of the few gay 80s classics that doesn’t touch the communal devastation of AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic.  It opens with a shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City that visually acknowledges how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s 1970s setting & 1980s production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality.  Arthur J. Bressan’s 1985 landmark Buddies does not sidestep the horrors of its time in the same way, but it does take similar interest in fleshing out its central characters’ lives & personalities, so they don’t register only as statistics.  The opening credits of Buddies scroll over a computer printout of deceased AIDS patients’ names to establish the scope of the illness’s death toll, but it then focuses on just two onscreen characters to humanize those names as full, real people.  Everyone else with a speaking role is a disembodied voice, heard from just off-screen.  The only people who matter are a man dying of AIDS-related health complications and a volunteer “Buddy” who’s been assigned to keep him company after he’s been left to die alone by family & friends.

Self-billed as “the first dramatic feature about the AIDS crisis”, Buddies has all of the furious politics of a Tongues Untied presented with the endearing tenderness of a Torch Song Trilogy, almost cleanly split between its only two onscreen characters.  Geoff Edholm stars as the dying man: a gay-rights activist whose commitment to communal advocacy proved to be no match to his community’s fear of transmission in the early, hazy days of AIDS research.  David Schachter is his assigned, volunteer buddy: a shy assimilationist who’s content to live a quiet domestic life with his boyfriend without any public acknowledgement of his sexuality.  Through lengthy stage-play conversations voicing their opposing views, they reluctantly learn from each other and become vulnerably intimate despite their opposing politics and lifespan expectancy.  It’s a painfully emotional watch, of course, especially after you learn that the actors’ real lives almost exactly mirrored the respective arcs of their characters.  Bressan’s own personality as an auteur is also just as clearly visible in the picture as Fierstein’s in Torch Song Trilogy, given that his two central characters bond by watching his earlier films together in a hospital room (from the political activism documentary Gay U.S.A. to the age-gap porno Forbidden Letters) and that Bressan himself soon lost his life to the AIDS epidemic as well as Edholm.

Parting Glances (1986)

Released just one year after Buddies, 1986’s Parting Glances offers a tempered middle ground between Bressan’s confrontational politics and Fierstein’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama. Unlike Torch Song Trilogy, it does contend with the unignorable presence of AIDS in contemporary urban gay life, but unlike Buddies it relegates AIDS to being just one aspect of modern gay life, not the totality of it.  Steve Buscemi plays the HIV+ character who bears the burden of that vital representation: a new wave musician with a once bustling social life who’s been shunned by his own community out of knee-jerk fear & stigma.  He remains defiantly playful & energetic despite being treated as if he were already dead by his chosen family, quipping his way through cramped-apartment cocktail parties and video-art recordings of his will.  Curiously, though, he is not the main character of the film; that designation belongs to his happily-coupled bestie who lives the quiet, assimilated domestic life that Fierstein craves in Torch Song Trilogy and Schacter starts to question in Buddies.  Both characters bounce their understandably jaded world views off friends, neighbors, and potential sexual partners while hopping around NYC social spaces, living a full life.  The contrast in the way they’re received by that community is drastically different, though, depending on their disclosed HIV status.

I may not have spent decades living in the big city like Harvey Fierstein, but I can name at least two things that were beautiful in 1980s NYC: the independent filmmaking scene and Steve Buscemi.  Parting Glances can’t help but feel a little restrained watching it so soon after its more confrontational precedent in Buddies, but every scene featuring Buscemi as a defiantly sardonic man with AIDS is electric. It says a lot that he’s not the main character but he’s the only face on the poster, affording the film the kind of strong, singular personality Fierstein impressed on Torch Song Trilogy and Bressan impressed on Buddies.  Like with Buddies, its open, honest discussion of AIDS during the violent silence of the Reagan regime only gets heavier knowing the history of the artists involved who also died of AIDS-related illnesses, including promising young director & playwright Bill Sherwood in this case, who did not live to make another film.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Believe it or not, not all urban gay life in the 1980s was confined to New York City.  They even had gay men across the pond back then, as dramatized in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette.  While gay men in America were fighting to survive Reagan, gay men in England were fighting to survive Thatcher, and the cultural circumstances on either side of that divide were remarkably similar.  So, My Beautiful Laundrette has to dig a little deeper into cultural specifics in order to stand out among gay independent cinema of its era, notably doing so here as the only film on this list with a non-white lead (albeit a closeted one).  Gordon Warnecke stars as a young Pakistani man who works his way up his uncle’s small-scale crime network until he can carve out a money-maker of his own by running one of the mobsters’ few legitimate businesses: a kitschy, old-school laundromat.  In order to help with the day-to-day operations (and to manufacture opportunities to have sex in the back office), he employs a childhood friend & potential future lover played by Daniel Day Lewis, who has betrayed their intimate bond by joining the ranks of some racist, fascist street punks. 

My Beautiful Laundrette takes so long to establish its premise that you forget you’re watching a Gay Movie until the leads start making out.  Decades later, it still feels remarkable to see a drama that treats that identity marker as background texture instead of it informing every single character decision & line of dialogue. There were infinite hurdles to surviving Thatcher; being a gay man was just one of them.  In that way, this is the film that best lives up to Torch Song Trilogy‘s presumed mission to depict a gay character with a full, fulfilling life.  It’s not exactly a healthy life, though, given that he has to navigate the racism of his community, the homophobic violence of the crime world, and his own internal questions of identity as a second-generation immigrant whose family hates the “little island” where they’ve raised him.  That doesn’t mean the movie is shy about his sexuality though.  If anything, it has the hottest sexual dynamics of any film listed here, with Daniel Day Lewis’s punk reprobate licking his employer’s neck, spitting champagne into his mouth, and playing into a class-divide role play dynamic that touches on all of the film’s hot-wire political issues at once. 

-Brandon Ledet

Cast List Power Rankings: A Room with a View (1985)

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It’s not something you’ll detect as quickly as my love for horror or sci-fi, but I’m an easy sucker for costume dramas.  Other genre fans are organized & mobilized enough to throw their own conventions where oceans of nerds line up to have Elvira sign their bald spots, but there isn’t really an equivalent for the costume drama (unless there are Ren Faire booths I don’t know about; please report back, if so).  And yet, if you’ve ever found yourself sipping Pinot Grigio at an opening-weekend screening of a Downton Abbey movie, you know the fandom for costume dramas can be just as electric. One buffoonish misstep from Mr. Molelsey at a stuffy dinner party and the crowd goes wild.  In that insular, quietly fired-up subculture, the names Merchant Ivory invoke rock star adulation the same way names like Romero, Carpenter, and Cronenberg get horror nerds’ brains whirring.  Somehow, I had never seen an Merchant-produed, Ivory-directed movie myself, though, despite the phrase “Merchant Ivory” being a recognizable adjective for a type of buttoned-up, award winning costume drama that I very much enjoy.  I recently filled in that knowledge gap with the producer-director duo’s breakout hit A Room with a View, which earned them three Oscars, four BAFTAs, and decades’ worth of household name recognition. 

Predictably, I had a wonderful time with it.  For all its Awards Circuit prestige, A Room with a View is a small, sweet romcom of manners that recalls the heightened social-maneuvers humor I love in Jane Austen comedies (please do not lecture me about the century’s difference between the Regency & Edwardian eras; I assure you I do not care).  What really floored me is how stacked the cast is with genre giants of the costume drama, all working in delicious harmony like spoonfuls of honey stirred into afternoon tea.  And since there would be no practical use for fully reviewing this genre-standard award magnet that hit American shores the year I was born, I’d mostly just like to discuss each member of the main cast individually.  Here’s a quick listing of the central players in A Room with a View, ranked from most to least essential.

1. Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse – DDL plays the ultimate dipshit fop, an uptight misogynist dandy whose wealth & status make him look like great marriage material on paper . . . until you spend ten seconds in his slimy presence.  It’s incredible how easily he steals the show, considering that he doesn’t appear on-screen for at least the first third of the runtime.  Once he crashes the party, though, he delivers a sublimely hateworthy comedic performance that the movie would be hollow without.

2. Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch – HBC is even more of a costume drama heavy-hitter than DDL, and I have to assume this early role was what landed her all that steady work in the unsteady past (unless there’s a huge Lady Jane fan club out there that I’m unaware of).  She’s a perfectly furious, frustrated teen as the film’s lead, stuck between the rich idiot she should want (DDL) and the hot idiot she does want (TBA).  Her furrowed brow while concentrating on complex piano pieces conveys a rich inner life in contrast to the sheltered social one she’s allowed to live outside her head, which makes her a great audience surrogate for young costume drama nerds who can’t wait to move out of their parents’ house.  She’s also got gloriously thick, extravagant curls of hair that are enviable at any age.

3. Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett – Speaking of Downton, Dame Margaret Natalie Smith brings long-established stage & screen prestige to the proceedings, even if she’s not allowed to cut as loose as she does with her withering quips as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham.  She’s in the same uptight chaperone role here as she plays in The Secret Garden, except her stiffness makes her the butt of her sister’s jokes instead of inspiring fear & good behavior in the teen she’s supposed to be keeping in check (HBC).  I’m sure it’s just a stock character Smith plucked out of her 60+ years & 80+ IMDb credits worth of experience acting on camera, but she does it well, and the punchlines at her expense are always solid (often to the refrain of “Poor, poor Charlotte”).

4. Denholm Elliott as Mr. Emerson – More of a That Guy character actor than the legendary Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott is nonetheless equally matched as her doddering comic foil.  He’s cast as a sweetheart eccentric, one whose “tactless”, “indelicate” boisterousness constantly pulls the rug out from under the rules-obsessed chaperone.  He also gets to ramble at length about the inane gender politics of who should get to have “a room with a view” at the opening hotel setting, a scene that feels like a contemporary SNL sketch written by a comedian who’s only seen the trailer, not the movie proper.

5. Fabia Drake & Joan Henley as the Misses Alan – The perpetually traveling spinster “sisters” are the closest thing the movie offers as aspirational objects of envy, especially if you read them as covert lesbians in a Boston marriage that everyone else just has to tolerate.

6. Judi Dench as Eleanor Lavish – You’d think Dame Judith Olivia Dench would rank as worthier competition to Dame Maggie Smith here, but her trash-novelist side character isn’t afforded much momentum to make a dent on-screen.  She does push Smith’s uptight nerd into her biggest fuck-ups, though (including spilling the beans on her young cousin/ward’s scandalous, unchaperoned kiss, published for all to read under a half-hearted pseudonym), which makes for some great comedy at her expense.  Poor, poor Charlotte.

7. Simon Callow as The Reverend Mr. Beebe – There are plenty of misbehaving vicars out there in cinemaland, but not many get to hang dong while roughhousing with their flock in the local swimming pond.  You’d expect it to be the bigger shock that HBC runs into her naked crush or her naked brother when she stumbles across said roughhousing on an afternoon stroll, but the naked vicar earns the biggest laugh.

8. Rupert Graves as Freddy Honeychurch – HBC’s younger, rowdier brother is exactly who you’d expect to stumble across in the throes of flagrant public nudity.  He doesn’t have much effect on the film’s tone or plot, but he is a playful, delightful source of chaos that makes HBC reluctant to graduate from childish japes to sincere adult emotions & romance.

9. Rosemary Leach as Mrs. Honeychurch – The siblings’ mother might get in a few great laughs with her passive aggressive jabs at “Poor, poor Charlotte,” but she doesn’t make much impact outside that mockery of her sister.  I also couldn’t tell if the actor looked at all familiar, or if she just had a vague resemblance to Kathy Bates.

10. Julian Sands as George Emerson – Has Julian Sands ever delivered a good performance in anything?  He’s at least laughably bad in films like Boxing Helena & Argento’s Phantom of the Opera.  I foolishly assumed he landed those jobs because he was impressive in the Merchant Ivory costume dramas that predate them, but holy shit, his overly mannered performances don’t even feel at home in the overly mannered past.  It’s a testament to DDL’s movie-making performance as the ridiculous cad Cecil Vyse that George Emerson comes across as HBC’s best option for love & marriage.  You could replace Sands with a cardboard cutout of a romance-novel cover model and the movie would be exactly the same.  He’s reliably useless.

-Brandon Ledet

Phantom Thread (2017)

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Because of his reputation as a formalist & a high-brow intellect, people often overlook a very important aspect of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, even when heaping on praise: he’s damn funny. This may be because the humor in PTA’s movies is usually coated with a thick grime of terrifying, soul-destroying bitterness. For instance, it’s difficult to describe the humor of Daniel Day-Lewis threatening to slit a stranger’s throat in There Will be Blood or Phillip Seymour Hoffman shouting “pig-Fuck!” in The Master, but those moments are indeed amusingly intense. Anderson’s latest, Phantom Thread, is a wonderful feature-length continuation of this tradition. It may take audiences a few minutes to defrost from the expectation of watching an Important, Oscar-Worthy Drama to realize it, but Phantom Thread really is a wickedly funny movie, the perfect encapsulation of PTA’s bitter, hubristic humor. Detailing the power dynamics of a dangerously tense long-term relationship between a 1950s Londoner dressmaker and his waitress-turned-muse, you might be tempted to assume the film is a tragically dour period piece with little patience for silliness. Instead, Daniel Day-Lewis & relative newcomer Vicky Krieps verbally spar in a nonstop comedic assault for the full two-hour runtime. The film still excels as a gorgeous, meticulously crafted period piece with dead serious things to say about power dynamic struggles in artist-muse romantic relationships; it just does so while making you laugh in wholly unexpected ways at every twisted turn in its intimate, absurdly well-mannered narrative. Paul Thomas Anderson has certainly been funny before, but never at this duration or consistency.

Reynolds Woodcock is sure to be remembered as one of the greater, more intense characters ever performed onscreen, a name as iconic as Norman Bates or Rupert Pupkin or, appropriately enough, Daniel Plainview. Daniel Day-Lewis plays the renowned dressmaker with the delicate, careful darkness of Werner Herzog’s speaking voice. Having let the praise for his (admittedly gorgeous) dress designs go to his head, Woodcock has devolved into an insufferable twerp who demands that the army of women who actually put in the labor to make his business functional (including a rotating cast of muses-du-jour) bend to his every whim at a moment’s notice. Phantom Thread flirts with the thematic possibilities of championing the unnoticed work of the women whom Woodcock steamrolls or parsing out exactly what he means when he describes himself as an “incurable confirmed bachelor.” Mostly, though, it just has a quiet laugh at the tension his function as a tyrannical drama queen generates in a house of women who do not have the power to tell him “No.” This dynamic shifts when his latest muse, Alma (Krieps), refuses to be steamrolled along with the rest and defiantly intends to treat Woodcock like the “spoiled little baby” he truly is. From then on, the movie details a three-way power struggle within the Woodcock household (Lesley Manville holds down the third corner as Reynold’s deliciously icy sister, Cyril), with everyone involved seemingly getting perverted pleasure out of the clash, regardless of their overly dramatic complaints. Despite his delicate, mannered exterior, Woodcock drives, eats, and structures his romances like a thrill-seeking maniac. It turns out he enjoys having his hubristic displays of power challenged, though, something no woman in his life had ever dared to do before Alma (besides his cutthroat, no-bullshit sister). Through that challenge they build a curiously violent, deceptively well-balanced life together.

You may be able to find a better version of this kind of tragically classy romance in an Alfred Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk picture. The Love Witch may be a flashier attempt at a playfully fashionable period pastiche with strong feminist themes. mother! may offer a more convincingly absurdist critique of artist-muse relationship dynamics. The Duke of Burgundy may be a more immersively gorgeous, cheekily fun examination of power struggles in a kinkily-mannered long-term romance. What Phantom Thread offers that resists comparison to other works is a very particular sense of humor distinct to Anderson’s collaborative energy with Day-Lewis. It’s difficult to describe why Woodcock peering menacingly over his glasses or the way PTA substitutes food for sex in this picture are so wickedly amusing; I actually suspect a lot of people won’t see it that way at all, given the subjective nature of humor. If you enter Phantom Thread looking for a modernist critique of the tyrannical Troubled Artist type set against a visually interesting backdrop & a sweeping, classy score (from fellow frequent PTA collaborator & Radiohead vet Jonny Greenwood), the movie is more than happy to oblige you. If you’re not laughing through the tension of the weaponized “polite” exchanges between Reynolds, Alma, and Cyril Woodcock, though, I’m not sure you’re fully appreciating what the movie is offering. This really is one of the finest comedies I’ve seen in a while. It has a wickedly peculiar, distinct sense of humor to it that you won’t find in many other features, a comedic tone Reynolds himself would likely describe as “a little naughty.” Just pray you don’t find yourself in a dead silent audience of intellectuals hellbent on taking every detail of that naughtiness seriously.

-Branodn Ledet