The mortal dislocations of World War II-our “Good War”-are formidably represented in the realm of the romantic. Casablanca, for example, sees patriotism prevailing over the love of one person. The English Patient sees the reverse.Īt the same time, high-flying ideals can become straitjackets or self-sabotage. Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious keys into a dark vein of lyricism, a place where self-sacrifice becomes voluptuous and ill. One thinks of William Blake’s iconic line, which sounds the bass note of Romantic poetry, “O Rose thou art sick.” That said, it is lyricism in all its textures-dark, light, aural, visual-that lifts these films to higher ground. Rodgers and Hart, in their song “Isn’t It Romantic?,” describe the feeling as “music in the night, a dream that can be heard … moving shadows write the oldest magic word.” Those moving shadows are movies.īeautiful and grave from the first strains of Gounod’s Faust to the last ray of sun bouncing off a window, Martin Scorsese’s film version of Edith Wharton’s greatest novel gets richer with every viewing. This period drama was a departure for Scorsese, until then known primarily for street, gang, and Mafia movies. But were the fabled 400 of New York’s Gilded Age any less controlling than the Cosa Nostra? Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, hasn’t sold his soul to the devil but to a gilded ideal. His marriage to the angelic debutante May Welland (Winona Ryder) will fulfill every conventional wish. But in May’s unconventional, unhappily married cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), he awakens to another ideal-the romance of deep affinity.
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