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Washington Post:

A Director Promotes the Wharton School

By Sharon Waxman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 14, 2001 ; Page G06

LOS ANGELES -- As a man from working-class Liverpool best known for his autobiographical films, director Terence Davies might not be the likeliest choice to take on the decorous savagery of New York's upper classes in the Gilded Age.

The 55-year-old Davies first read Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth" 13 years ago. But the devastating critique of New York's high society in the early 1900s, told through the tragic heroine Lily Bart, did not appeal to him until several years later, when it suddenly struck him as an utterly modern tale.

Originally, Davies says, "I thought it was a wonderful novel -- a great, tragic novel -- but I didn't think it was a film." On rereading it in 1994 he saw the book as "modern and true. Everything is based on what you look like and how much money you've got," he says, in a phone conversation from London.

Lily, a glittering jewel in the crown of New York's social set, is at 29 just past her maiden prime, naive if not always innocent, and with fatally poor timing.

By society's script, Lily must find a rich husband to sustain her, and she has too long resisted the destiny of her gender. With the shine of her beauty just slightly dulled by overexposure, with her finances precarious and a whiff of desperation about her, Lily begins to stumble ever downward into social disfavor, disgrace and finally poverty. The society that once adulated her beauty and charm rejects her without a second glance.

But "House of Mirth" -- the title taken from a cautionary verse in Ecclesiastes -- is emphatically not a feminist tract, Davies insists. Instead it's about shallow values and the elevation of superficiality.

"It's irrelevant that she's a woman. It could be a man as well in today's society," he explains in a high-British accent that belies his working-class roots.

"The underlying themes are of wealth, beauty -- of the way that can corrupt and destroy. We have a direct connection with that. Then, there was an aristocratic oligarchy. People who get into that position lay down the law. Now it's people who are beautiful with very little talent."

He begins to warm to his subject. "Look at the way we're interested in film stars who fall from grace," he continues. "It's the same group mentality of finding the quarry and going after it. Look at . . . Robert Downey Jr., what he does in his private life -- look at the way he's been hounded.

"Once we put these idols there, we feel we have the right not only to know every detail about them but to destroy them if we wish. And society in Edith Wharton's time felt the same about Lily."

And yet Lily Bart is not merely a victim; she finds a belated redemption by choosing her own private morality over social rehabilitation at the expense of others. That choice neatly makes her character more noble on the inside even as it loses the glitter of its outward trappings. And it suits the personal code of Davies, whose work is often referred to as "stoical."

To bring such a woman to life, Davies needed an especially gifted actress, and he unexpectedly chose the star of "The X-Files," Gillian Anderson. The British director had never seen an episode of the show (he still hasn't), but when he saw a photograph of Anderson he was taken with her aristocratic features and hauntingly pale coloring. She reminded him, he says, of a John Singer Sargent painting.

"Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine," Wharton says of Lily at the start of "House of Mirth." "Was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?"

Anderson had to audition for the part, and then Davies -- who was working off a patchwork of financing and a tiny $8.2 million budget -- had to persuade her to take it at a fraction of her usual fee.

She did, and critics seem to feel the actress rose to the occasion (though a few found her miscast). Under Davies' direction, the vivid Anderson speaks in low tones and -- like most of the characters -- moves little. (The cast includes Eric Stoltz as Lawrence Selden, Lily's best, missed chance at love, who floats past on the social scale; and Laura Linney as Bertha Dorset, the society viper prepared to strike when Lily falters.)

The tone of the film is quiet, its visual look rich and painterly -- inspired by Vermeer, Davies says -- and its power all the more intense because ofthe slow pace at which Lily moves toward her fate. To save money, Davies shot in Glasgow, Scotland, using its grand old mansions and even city hall to re-create New York at the start of the 20th century.

Calling the film "a feast of small sensations," the Village Voice noted that "Anderson's Lily is a character who seems to be lucidly conscious as she sleepwalks toward the abyss and who manages to maintain her considerable social graces even as she tumbles in. The actress holds herself in reserve for her last scenes . . . to devastating effect."

Davies was born the youngest of seven children in a poor Liverpool family. In many interviews he has spoken of having had the "self-esteem beaten out of me" at school, where he was bullied, and at home. His father, by the writer's account a violent and unpredictable man, died when Davies was 7.

Davies had other conflicts: He was a devout Catholic and a homosexual, and in a working-class town he dreamed of being a writer.

Instead he dropped out of school at 15 to become a bookkeeper, a career he maintained for 12 years, writing and acting in his spare time. He acted in Liverpool theater and wrote dramas that were performed on local radio, but was rejected by a succession of drama schools until he made it into England's National Film School at 32.

His works won acclaim from early on. An autobiographical trilogy -- made from 1976 to 1983, and usually referred to simply as "The Terence Davies Trilogy" -- gathered international acclaim, and the director went on to more praise for "Distant Voices, Still Lives," an impressionistic chronicle of his family in the 1940s and '50s, and "The Long Day Closes," a more upbeat story of his youth intermingled with popular music of the era.

A foray into the American South with "Neon Bible," starring Gena Rowlands, in 1995 was a critical bust and the last thing Davies completed before rereading "House of Mirth."

That experience of failure may have provided the seed that made "House of Mirth" feel so relevant.

"In America, there's still this ruthless thing that you've got to be a success, and if you're not it's your own fault," he reflects. "There's something chilling about that. Very chilling. You feel over there as if you have a disease which is catching. With 'Neon Bible,' it was not a success -- but I still stand by it -- and no one was interested in me. I was avoided like the plague. You really feel it."

That Davies champions Lily may not be such a surprise after all. "What she comes to know is that she has a moral integrity, a moral truth," he observes. "Once you realize you've got that, you can't compromise it, it's too important."

THE END

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