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Oakland Tribune
Article last updated: Friday, January 19, 2001 10:07 AM MST
Old obsessions remain 'Mirth' director Davies
By Judy Stone CONTRIBUTOR

For years, Terence Davies made films about his childhood in a house of misery, a Liverpool slum, but even now with his acclaimed ``House of Mirth," he is still haunted by old obsessions about class, money and beauty.

He arrived at the Toronto Film Festival last September buoyed with excitement by the film's enthusiastic reception at a screening for 4,000 people in Locarno, Switzerland.

Still he declined to speculate about whether ``House of Mirth" (which opens today in Berkeley), based on Edith Wharton's 1905 novel, would have more popular appeal than his critically acclaimed autobiographical art-house productions, including ``Distant Voices, Still Lives" (1988) and ``The Long Day Closes" (1992).

What excited him about Wharton's novel and the tragic fate of her New York upper-class heroine, Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson), was its modernity.

``It's about what do you look like and how much money have you got. And what is modern society about?" he asked rhetorically, ``Nothing's changed except for the frocks that are worn. It's probably worse now because what happened then and what happens now is that if you've got a lot of money, you've got a lot of power and it's automatically assumed you've got moral power. That's really sinister because you don't have moral power. You've got some clout because of your bank balance.

``What is equally sinister is the kind of repellent narcissism that's around everywhere now and was around then, but it's worse now. It's dreadful. Everything you look at, particularly advertisements. It's not about selling the product. It's about selling these beautiful people. Subtextually they're saying, `If you're not as good looking as we are, don't bother buying the product. You don't deserve to have it.'

``That's why the book is very modern, it's about surfaces. It's the perfect example of that line from `The Importance of Being Earnest': `We live in an age of surfaces.' We did then and we do now."

Davies chose Gillian Anderson for the lead when he saw her photograph because she looked like a portrait by John Singer Sargent, the great portrait painter of that period. Someone in the production company protested that she stars in television's ``X-Files." Davies didn't know what that was and cared less. ``She was in London at the time," Davies said.

``She read for me and she was brilliant."

Davies, 55, who also wrote the script, emphasized that he kept the ``tone" of Wharton's novel and used some of her dialogue, but that he had to change some elements.

``For instance, you can't have men saying, `by gad, sir' now and you certainly can't have an American saying it because it sounds too British. But American aristocracy was very British then and it was very British until the 1940s. You listen to Eleanor Roosevelt speak and she sounds British. She almost uses the long A."

There were things he left out of Wharton's book because they were wrong for a modern film. ``For instance, at the end of the book, Lily is on the Lower East Side and bumps into a girl she had given charity to, and this girl is poor but honest and has a poor but honest child and a poor but honest husband. It's the worst kind of 19th century sentimentality and it had to go."

He also eliminated Wharton's anti-Semitic reference to the financier Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia) as ``just a little Jew."

``I couldn't bring myself to write some of the things she wrote," Davies said, ``You're shocked when you read that. That's one of the blemishes in the book. She was like the rest of her class, anti-Jewish and anti-black. The important thing isn't that he's Jewish, but that he's the only honest one and the only one who shows genuine compassion at the end."

In the film, Grace Stepney (Jodhi May), who inherits the money Lily had hoped for, is combined with the character of Gerty Farish, who is in love with Lawrence Seldon (Eric Stoltz).

``Separately, the characters are not interesting," Davies believes. ``Together they're much more interesting because it makes Grace much more vicious. She's not just refusing to help Lily out of moral rectitude and Christian charity in which there's no love. It's out of sexual jealousy and that's much more interesting. It's all the more dramatic because she consciously is not aware of it, although she knows it to be true."

There are areas, Davies said with intense personal feeling, ``in which we all deny the real truth, and it's only when you're faced with it that it shows how morally strong or weak you are.

``My weakness is that I'm very sarcastic about men who are very good looking. It's for one good reason: I'm jealous because I'm not good looking. That is why I'm nasty and I've got to stop it."

He said he'd like to look like Brad Pitt ``even though he can't act his way intoIngrid Pitt!"

He always decries the emphasis on personal appearances, particularly in homosexual relationships. The son of a brutal father, Terence was only 7 when his dad died, but the scars remained.

He quit a Catholic secondary school when he was 15, worked as an accountant for 12 years and wrote for local radio at night. Conscious of the painful conflict between his homosexuality and his Catholicism, in 1983, he wrote a novel ``Hallelujah Now," about a character who was gay and Catholic and the combination destroyed him.

Every learning process is always hard, Davies noted, speaking perhaps for himself as well as Lily.

``At the end, Lily becomes a truly tragic figure because she realizes the truth of her situation and she finds a kind of redemption and a kind of integrity, but it comes through suffering because nothing is achieved without that.

``Unfortunately. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Nietzsche said that. I don't go along with all his ubermensch stuff but what doesn't kill you does make you stronger. However, it's always painful. Change always is. I feel sympathy for anyone who has suffered and realizes why they have suffered. What that produces in us is compassion. It may not be in a huge gesture, but it can also be in a small one."

THE END

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