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Boston Globe
Full 'House'
Anderson is only part of rich portrait of New York society
By Jay Carr, Globe Staff, 1/19/2001

Nobody portrayed the Gilded Age as gilded cage more trenchantly and with more surgical precision than Edith Wharton. Henry James's reputation exceeds hers, but her writing is more direct and less prissy than his. She might have been the Jane Austen of her society, but while Austen wanted into the landowning English gentry of her time, and believed in love over the power of money, Wharton wanted out of the glacial embrace of the Manhattan social elite. She believed that love counted for little without money, at least in her frostily decorous corner of the world.

Film has done well by Wharton, and not simply because the period costumes and furnishings are so swoony to look at. These are the people Sargent and Cassatt painted. Gillian Anderson, who in ''The House of Mirth'' plays the central role of Lily Bart, defined by her corset and aircraft-carrier-size picture hat, looks as if she could have stepped from one of their canvases. Her foolish heart is the motor of Terence Davies's adaptation of Wharton's semiautobiographical novel, which is, to give you an idea of where Wharton was coming from, anything but mirthful. In early-20th-century New York, Lily inhabits a narrow, stifling society where a stare held for an extra beat in a drawing room could amount to a social death sentence.

When Martin Scorsese filmed ''The Age of Innocence,'' he said he was fascinated by the ways in which these people used beautiful manners as lethal weapons. He considered them far more ruthless than the mafiosi he usually filmed.

''The Age of Innocence'' was a potent transfer from the page to the screen. So, too, is Davies's exquisite Venus flytrap of a film. To be British, as the late Penelope Gilliatt once observed, is to be one of 60 million experts on the class system, and Davies is British. The nuances of maintaining power - which is what class systems are all about - are second nature to him, as is the expression of them.

They include almost-never-encountered degrees of silence and darkness in this film largely shot in and around the Victorian architecture of Glasgow. Davies is braver than Scorsese, too, in that he dispenses with the voice-overs Scorsese employed and bolsters his film with Wharton's narrative voice. Davies brings it off, though, largely through the play of emotions on the face of Anderson's Lily, who pays a heavy price because she refuses to play the game. This is an important point. Lily has been described as a victim, crushed by the cold powermongers of her world as if she were no more than a grape. But Lily knows what she's doing.

She's impulsive, as evidenced by the fact that she runs up debts playing cards. She all but yawns in the face of the rich stuffy bachelor she's being thrown together with at a country weekend. She rather likes an only moderately prosperous lawyer, Selden, played by Eric Stoltz. She's too snooty to seriously entertain the proposal of a rich social climber, Rosedale, played by Anthony LaPaglia. Her mistake lies in assuming she can always come back into the fold with a suitable show of penitence after going too far. But when she runs afoul of an acquaintance (played with brittle feline brilliance by Laura Linney in a small but pivotal role), her fortunes begin to follow her reputation downhill.

Once Lily's slide starts, it's accelerated, ironically, by her integrity. She's heedless, but she's honest and she won't play dirty - traits that put her at a disadvantage when some women in her set feel threatened by her independence and unsheath their claws, or, in the case of a mealy-mouthed niece of the aunt from whom Lily had hoped to inherit, poison Lily's future. Lily is foolish, but she's a woman of integrity, and she pays dearly for refusing to compromise. Lily follows a somber trajectory, and Davies sticks with Wharton's grim logic in tracing it.

Lily has social position, but not money, and it begins to look as if her status is going to be blasted out from under her by people adept at playing the games she disdains. Those who know Anderson only from TV's ''X-Files'' will find this performance a revelation, especially since so much of it comes, wordlessly, from between and beneath the stilted locutions in which these characters armor themselves. Davies matches Wharton's gimlet-eyed view of the social ice floes closing in on Lily. There was little mirth or innocence in the world that Wharton was able to write her way out of (she was much happier living in Paris), and Davies and his leading lady lift the silks to reveal it as the minefield it was.

THE END

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