The Age of Innocence.

There it is, in the same suburban multiplex that is showing Warlock II: The Armageddon, the John Woo-Jean-Claude Van Damme killfest, Hard Target, and that leftover summer fluff, Sleepless in Seattle. There it is, using its two-hour-plus running time to explore the refined sensibilities of lovers stifled by the rigorous social code of upper-class New York in the 1870s, while in the adjoining theaters, behind walls so thin you can hear the gunfire and the shrieks and the thuds, Stallone and Van Damme and Bruce Willis pound their enemies to pulp.

"It," of course, is Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, as brought to the screen by Martin Scorsese and (in an access of courage or insanity) given mass release by Columbia. My fear was that Scorsese would justify the wide distribution all too handily. He is the greatest living American film director, but it's only the quality of his work that sets it apart from that of most of his peers, not its essential nature. For, like his peers, Scorsese is a filmmaker of sensation, not sensibility. Wouldn't Scorsese, however much craft he put into this project, coarsen this novel's texture?

The first fifteen minutes threatened to justify my fears. Setting the scene, Scorsese's camera seems to wallow in the luxury of Wharton's bon ton: the quantity of food, the clegance of the place settings, and the vastness of the brownstone interiors. Now, it's true that milieu must be defined by physical detail and Wharton's people are certainly the slaves of their own accessories. But wasn't Scorsese overdoing it? Didn't his hyperthyroid cinematics distance us from the settings and characters instead of making us intimate with them? When would this travelogue into the past cease and the drama begin?

And then it did begin. And continued with a sort of murmuring boldness that was amazing after its blaring beginning.

For me, the ignition was a snub to the heroine. The Countess Ellen Olenska, born and bred a New Yorker, but married into the Polish nobility, has fled Europe and her disastrous marriage and taken shelter with her relatives. Her family tries to give a welcoming dinner party for her, but - the gentry disapproving in advance of her contemplated divorce - each invitation is returned with regrets. Scorsese composes a close-up of Ellen, looking like a slapped child, and then reddens the shot until she is obliterated. It's a bold yet complicated stroke. We may associate red with anger or at least passion, but Ellen is not given to rage nor is the expression on her face anything but stricken. Yet the color is fight, for it expresses not Ellen's emotions but the vicious societal animosity underlying the cold societal snub. And the cinematic erasure corroborates what the narrator (Joanne Woodward) tells us about this society's rejections serving to obliterate individuals who do not conform. Here, and throughout the rest of the movie, Scorsese's accomplishment is to use the resources of his medium to depict the currents under surface events.

Those events constitute a very simple plot about two very complicated people inching toward a love affair that never takes place. Newland Archer, who has never questioned his society's ethos, finds himself attracted to Ellen Olenska just when he has announced his engagement to May Welland, a seemingly docile product of that society. The first half of the story dramatizes his increasing attachment to this instinctive and stylish nonconformist until his fiancee inadvertently calls his honor to account. Since he cannot conceive of himself hurting May, and since the countess herself declares that she can love him only if he remains the sort of man who does not hurt the May Wellands of the world, he breaks with Ellen and marries his betrothed. The narrative's second half shows Archer struggling desperately against his persisting love for the countess, finally reaching the point where he must leave his wife and affront, even break from, his New York matrix. But then May intervenes again, this time deliberately and even (under her placid exterior) ruthlessly to keep her man beside her, and their place in society intact.

Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Jay Cocks, lay out this story faithfully and, for the most part, lucidly. Their few alterations are for the sake of momentum, not inflation. For instance, by lifting Olenska's disparaging remarks about American high society aping European manners from the novel's last half and inserting them into her first encounter with Archer, the adaptors prepare us for Ellen's later difficulties. The one major fault of the script occurs near midpoint, when May expresses suspicion of Newland's previous involvement with "a married woman." In the book, this old flame was identified by name and clearly placed in relation to Archer's past, but since she's never shown or even named on screen, audience members who haven't read the book may assume that May is being jealous of Ellen. And so one of Wharton's best ironies is lost. This problem could have been avoided by a quick flash-back. My only other criticism is that the screenplay's concentration on the book's lyricism is at the expense of its wit. Otherwise, the adaptation is a model for what it includes and excludes.

But, good as the script is, a routine director might have turned it into a sluggish, though literate, movie. Scorsese's staging probes and illuminates, but in a very different manner from that of his earlier films. In them, there was always an abundance of pungent dialogue and good acting but everything was swept along by Scorsese's visual rhetoric. In The Age of Innocence, the balance between what is seen and how the camera sees it is adjusted in favor of the actor.

In a box at the theater, Newland joins the countess and her companions. He has been profoundly moved by the play; it has fueled his romantic feelings and he wants to share his rapture with this woman he desires. At first, they neither speak nor look at each other, and the chit chat of their friends prevails. Then Scorsese abruptly shuts off the surrounding sound, including the bustle in the orchestra seats below. A spotlight illuminates the two lovers. And into this sudden silence the countess speaks, while the whole world is hushed so that Archer may savor her words. It's a coup de theatre, yet, as executed here, intimate and unforced.

Scorsese can take a perfectly ordinary sight, logs burning in a fireplace, and transform it into a motif that certifies what an actor is expressing. Early in the story, when the countess yields to Archer's counsel that she remain in her loveless marriage, the director cuts to the fireplace as a semiconsumed log collapses into the blaze. Later, when Ellen shows Newland why he must give her up and marry May, the shot of the burning wood is repeated: now it's his turn to submit. Near the conclusion, when Archer is about to ask his wife for a divorce, she thwarts him with a startling announcement. Once again, a log collapses but this time May goes to the fireplace and pushes the wood into the center of the fire so that it may be consumed even more rapidly. Despite her simpering exterior, May knows exactly what she wants and exactly how to get it.

The problem for the three leads was to keep the audience aware that under polite surfaces storms are raging but never to let the audience dismiss those surfaces as mere hypocrisy. All three performances succeed brilliantly.

Michelle Pfeiffer, in a sense, had the easiest task since the countess is the one character in this story to whom modem audiences can relate easily: the proto-liberated woman in revolt. On the other hand, Olenska is also the most ambiguous character. She expresses a need to be alone and yet is eagerly social; seems to lead Archer on, yet sternly reminds him of his obligations to others; desires to be protected by her lover yet can find a way out of a desperate situation without his help. Pfeiffer's triumph lies not in rationalizing Olenska. The whole woman is there: the attractive physicality (Pfeiffer knows the trick of making cigarette smoking look chic), the nonchalance of a Europeanized American who knows the falsities that prevail on both sides of the ocean, the desperation of a woman who sees an abyss of poverty and friendlessness opening before her. Pfeiffer understands that Ellen is a maddening complexity even to herself.

Daniel Day-Lewis fooled me again. As in My Beautiful Laundrette and The Last of the Mohicans, here he seems to spend the first fifteen minutes skating on the surface of his role as if being comfortable with one's costume and hair style were all there is to acting. I listened and watched very carefully, wondering when the performance was going to begin. After a time, I realized that I was regarding Newland Archer as if he were a childhood friend, as if I were privy to his deepest secrets (as, of course, I was, thanks to Wharton). Day-Lewis's acting had been going on since his first moment on camera, but it is the sort of acting that has no bravura "points" and flourishes. (Day-Lewis can do the bravura stuff, too, as witness A Room with a View and My Left Foot.) James Agee once described a performance of Teresa Wright's as showing "a novelist's perceptiveness behind the [acting] talent." Same goes for this latest gem from Day-Lewis.

Even critics who have liked this movie have had reservations about Winona Ryder's depiction of May as being too "modern." I found it to be a beautiful piece of work, always in character and in period, and revelatory of both American turn-of-the-century innocence and a hard pragmatism that could coexist with that innocence.

In retrospect, I now wonder that I doubted Scorsese to be the right adaptor for Edith Wharton. Yes, his art is violent and coruscating, but Wharton's is robust and highly dramatic. When the defeated Archer finds himself seated at a farewell dinner for his never-to-be-mistress, Scorsese's climactic long shot is as highly evocative of entrapment as Wharton's language. Archer's adored one is at his elbow while his wife is separated from him by the length of the table. Yet the countess is now unreachable while May has him in a bear trap. The socialites seated on either side of the table have primed that trap to perfection. And the serving men, at attention behind the seated guests, stand as strong as sentries, as merciless as prison guards. It's a trap of obligations that Jean-Claude Van Damme couldn't slug his way out of, against which even Clint Eastwood's six-shooters couldn't prevail.

Edith Wharton and Martin Scorsese are perfectly congenial because both of them understand the uses of force.