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BAZAAR Magazine
January 2001 (page 64)
Film Notes:
The Lady Vanishes
The House of Mirth is a devastating portrait
of one woman's glittering fall from grace.
By Manohla Dargis

The great British director Terence Davies indulges in the sort of naked emotionalism that seems almost too old-fashioned for these impassive times. His films overflow with as many feelings as ideas, and with The House of Mirth, he's managed to accomplish something you don't much experience at the movies anymore. He's made a film that swells your heart, then breaks it to pieces. Based on Edith Wharton's savagely satiric novel, and set in New York City just after the turn of the century, the story centers on a young American aristocrat named Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) who's thwarted by high society as well as her own calamitous instincts. In both the film and the book, hers is a terrible story, brilliantly told.

Lily has been raised to be agreeable and useless, a costly accessory for the right man. Orphane, with no means of support, she lives off the reluctant good graces of her elderly aunt, a relic from an earlier age who disapproves of her niece's modern fancies. Lily's one advantage is her looks, yet at the age of 29 she is dangerously close to social irrelevancy. Still, for reasons she can't explain even to herself, she dreads a dull future even more than she fears an unmarried one. Though marriage is her calling, she has made a careless habit out of rejecting suitors.

Barely known outside his own country, Davies is a master of the exquisitely mounted personal film, such as Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), a prose poem set in the impoverished Liverpool of his childhood. His ravishing style and acute sensitivity to social class inform every frame of The House of Mirth, as does his love for melodrama -- especially the tearstained sort once found in movies known, somewhat contemptuously, as women's pictures. Perhaps as a consequence, he is more sympathetic than Wharton to Lily, a sentiment emphasized by his casting of Anderson. (Davis coyly claims that he didn't know she was the star of The X-Files.) With her hourglass silhouette and melancholy porcelain beauty, Lily looks as if she could have stepped out of a John Singer Sargent painting. The film is impeccably cast -- Laura Linney and Eric Stoltz, as Lily's one last hope, are particularly outstanding -- but it is Anderson who gives the story its almost unbearably painful intimacy and turns this comedy of manners into tragedy.

Too many historical films feel musty and stale, like rooms in need of airing out. There's nothing moth-eaten about Davies' period re-creation; the film's aesthetic and performances are meticulous and timeless, not inert. The House of Mirth has an emotional urgency that blasts through its sepulchral mansions with the violence of a storm. It's an urgency that makes Lily's fingers tremble when she holds a cigarette for a suitor to light, that colors her voice when she deflects attack. She seems to be going through the motions, but what she's really doing is fighting for her life.

THE END

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