In Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, which city is the story primarily set in?

Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence is primarily set in New York City.

The 1993 film adapts Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel about upper-class New York society in the 1870s. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Newland Archer, a lawyer engaged to May Welland, while Michelle Pfeiffer plays Countess Ellen Olenska, whose return to New York challenges the social rules governing marriage and reputation.

The city is not merely a backdrop. Its wealthy social circles function as a tightly controlled system in which family names, dinners, opera boxes, engagements, and gossip determine acceptable behavior. Scorsese uses period interiors and costumes to show how elegance can conceal emotional pressure.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. It is sometimes overlooked in discussions of Scorsese because it lacks his familiar crime-film setting, but it remains a detailed study of power, restraint, and social conformity.