Directorial miscasting: Martin Scorsese moves from the agitated, violent, profane turf of Mean Streets and Raging Bull into the genteel neighborhood of Edith Wharton, of "fine literature," and of the Manhattan haut monde of the 1870s. He answers the opening bell in his customary Smoking Joe fashion: rushing in, reeling backwards, circling, swooping, jabbing you in the eye with a flurry of closeups, suddenly spinning to the side in a vertiginous blur as though he had just caught a solid hook to the chin, shaking it off and bouncing back with renewed fury. And all this for a tony scene at the opera. Throughout the rest of the movie he lugs along and freely dips into his jangling, clanking grab-bag of stylistic gimmicks: the meandering Steadicam; dissolves galore; irises and modified irises; theatrical lighting changes; etc. The general effect, given the context, is bull-in-a-china-shop. Make that raging-bull-in-a-china-shop. This carries over as well into the handling of the story, which, although perfectly "faithful" to the one in the novel, in fact almost cripplingly and coweringly fearful of it, is nevertheless pressed for time and lurches through the developments with little regard for their incremental gradation. And even if you are adequately braced for Martin Scorsese the Raging Bull, you might be completely unprepared for Martin Scorsese the Fat Cat, the Big Spender, the Conspicuous Consumer. (James Ivory, eat your heart out!) How many Gourmet Magazine plates of food do we need to see? How many Vanity Fair-ad jewels? How many gowns? How many flowers? How many paintings per wall? Knickknacks per table top? The movie is every bit as overproduced as it is overdirected: overstuffed, ostentatious, indiscriminate, vulgar, literal-minded, leadenly prosaic, and, in the context of a critique of the wealthy, possibly just a wee bit hypocritical. Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd