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Palo Alto Online
A review of 'House of Mirth
by Jeanne Aufmuth (Palo Alto Online)
Stars: 3.5 (out of 4)

It’s been a long, dry spell without a delicious period piece to sink one’s teeth into. Thank you, Terence Davies, for adapting Edith Wharton’s novel of turn-of-the-century bleeding hearts into an exquisite moviegoing experience.

Gillian Anderson, we hardly know ye. Shed of her tailored, severe 'X-Files' suiting and swathed in crinoline and lace, Anderson is Lily Bart, the most eligible young woman on the singles circuit in New York City, circa 1905. Lily pals around with the social gadabouts of her set, waiting to be plucked from the pack and set up in an appropriate marriage. But Lily’s heart is interfering with her marital ambitions, set as it is on Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz), a confirmed but sympathetic bachelor.

Oh, the wicked ways of the idle rich. The gossip and manipulation. Passionate and indecent declarations of puritan lust. Lily’s gilded lily begins to brown at the edges when she is swept up in a sensational scandal involving a married man, courtesy her friend and confidante Bertha Dorset (Laura Linney). With no visible means of support and a tarnished reputation, well, what’s a girl to do? Call it the rise and fall of the terribly vexed.

The script is peppered with such juicy tidbits of Wharton-speak as, 'if obliquity were a vice, we should all be tainted', and 'men - have minds like moral flypaper'.

Anderson is radiant, even when reduced to desperately scrabbling for a rung on the slippery social ladder. Linney is delightfully wicked as a woman who will stop at nothing (and step on everyone) to get what she wants. Dan Aykroyd, Terry Kinney, and Anthony LaPaglia round out the amusing, dramatic ensemble of men on whom women depend.

Costumes are luscious, the interiors a decadent ode to bygone days. Score one for Davies - it’s thoroughly refreshing to wallow about in a gentler age without the Merchant Ivory label attached.

THE END

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