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Movieline Magazine
The House of Mirth
by Michael Atkinson



An absolutely exemplary literary costume drama--in that it captures what is enduring in its aged source material and extends profoundly into the present--Terence Davies' The House of Mirth is one of the year's best movies, and it's no small amazement that one of the primary reasons why is Edith Wharton herself. The entire literary-classic genre is a wonder all its own--an organic act of cultural preservation; just when you thought no one read or cared about Edith Wharton novels anymore, here they come barreling at you as soul-searing, thoroughly modern movies.

But Davies' movie stands out: not since A Room with a View has a classic novel been so perfectly realized on film, and yet The House of Mirth is incredibly distinct from that seminal Ivory-Merchant fave. It is, simply, the acreage between the safe and cloaked dramatics of Jane Austen and E.M. Forster, and the take-no-prisoners social attack of Wharton. The House of Mirth might be a bodice-&-drawing room drama, but it's also one of the year's most lacerating films.

Davies, a Brit director whose earlier, haunting movies Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes were closer to memorial tone poems that narrative film, nails down the odyssey of Lily Bart, but he's got an awesome assist from Gillian Anderson, who is hands down the best actress of the year. When we meet her, Bart is a New York socialite circa 1905 who is a bit too intelligent for her place, and too beautiful not to use it.Anderson gives Lily a full, frightening four dimensions, so that at first she is exhilaratingly independent and even amused by her own absurd husband-hunting and her failure to snare cool bachelor Lawrence Seldon (Eric Stoltz). But saddled with gambling debts and, eventually, a seemingly compromised womanhood (thanks to rebuffed moneybags Dan Ackroyd and scheming bitch Laura Linney), Lily begins to see the downward slope she's on as a single, unmarried woman without a livelihood, and Anderson makes us see her confidence and wit ever so slowly dissolve into nerve-wracking desperation.

Wharton's engineering of Lily's demise is crystal-clear and so far beyond the capabilities of modern novelists that it's a wonder they don't all become plumbers, and Davies does well by serving it without indulging himself with too many locations, costumes and props. But it's Anderson's show, and by the film's end she's brought you through a ring of hell. It's a unique experience in movies this year, and shouldn't be missed.

THE END

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