back

S.F. Bay Guardian
January 10-16, 2001
Vol. 35, No. 15



Terence Davies rebuilds The House of Mirth. By Dennis Harvey

When an artist jumps out of the box with a work as personal as it is original, there's always the fear that he or she may have left room for nothing but self-imitation. Terence Davies's first three features constituted just such a definitive gesture: The Terence Davies Trilogy, 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives, and 1992's The Long Day Closes are like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, in that fragments of formative memory form an endless nostalgic refrain that our invisible, now-grown-up narrator is unwilling or unable to escape. No one has touched their fugue-style mix of inseparable tenderness and horror, painterly tableaux and psychological brute realism, popular song and killing silence. It was Davies's gift to make his working-class domestic unhappiness at once painfully specific and transportingly, lyrically universal.

When he moved away from autobiographical material with 1995's literary adaptation in The Neon Bible, however, it was the worst kind of disappointment. The House of Mirth didn't look like a good idea, either - another very American literary subject, another very specific cultural milieu light years away from Liverpool. But Davies's adaptation of the 1905 Edith Wharton fiction turns out to be both a return to form and an unguessable leap forward, the kind of movie that instantly makes every other one you've seen lately look like used Christmas wrapping.

Not that everyone will like it. Davies's House of Mirth is more cheerless than Wharton's (and hers was pretty ironic about that "mirth" to begin with); its social satire, while often funny, anticipates tragedy from the start. Fate closes in like a massive oak door creaking ever so slowly shut on unwelcome visitors. In short, this is a major downer. But there's also something grand about Davies's design that lends Mirth an unusual weight.

Gillian Anderson plays the orphaned Lily Bart, who moves in the uppermost reaches of New York society, which at this point in time has accumulated more than enough wealth, class consciousness, and pretension to trump the Old World's most convoluted standards for propriety. As a free agent, Lily is both envied and closely watched: it is to be expected that a marriageable one such as herself would try to finagle the best match (economically, status-wise, with a nominal nod to "love") possible, but even more that she not appear to be doing so.

But Lily is a fairly transparent schemer, her every move overinterpreted by craftier hypocrites such as married "best friend" Bertha Dorset (Laura Linney) and genuine prudes such as the formidable Auntie Peniston (Eleanor Bron). Her near-romantic friendship with another tenuously respectable - i.e., cash-poor - dilettante, Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz), is viewed as a scandal waiting to happen. Living well beyond her means, bungling various "smart" prospects, she accepts an offer of sure-thing stock speculation from Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd). But his motivations are hardly altruistic, and Lily's own belated sense of moral rectitude prevents her from publicly crying foul. Worse, the same strangling restraint later leaves Lily's reputation absorbing the full impact of an adulterous friend's cover-up.

Davies's screenplay makes composites of a few characters to good effect and shaves the excess melodrama from Wharton's final arm-twisting of cruel fate. But his House of Mirth is hardly up-to-the-moment sexy and exciting, like such recent free adaptations as Mansfield Park or The Wings of the Dove. Instead he digs so deeply into a wildly alien culture of surfaces - one in which absolutely no one says what he or she means and beautiful manners are meant to be exclusive rather than welcoming - that the film itself seems preserved in amber, a liquid in which we slowly drown right along with Lily.

X-Filer Anderson at first seems all wrong here: too old, too modern, falling into that trap of treating another era's courtly ways as arch bitch-quippery. But as Lily self-destructs - with more than a little help from her friends - the actor rises to Davies's less-is-more challenge, conveying all degrees of panic with a restraint that's eventually wrenching.

With his proven sympathy (bordering on self-pity) for the individual crushed by institutionalized cruelty, Davies risks making Mirth a dying-swan weepie. But he never forgets that Lily is just a cog in the machine - not the brightest cog, either. If she grows more vulnerably human with each consecutive fall, this tragedy moves us not least because it's so clear that her doom is a consequence of the class-hierarchy game she's played badly. It deserves to collapse; there's virtue but no innocence in becoming its victim en route.

The House of Mirth is gorgeous yet challenging: Davies's tempo will spellbind some viewers, while others will feel every one of the 135 minutes' glacial weight. It's moviemaking shrouded in mystery, black lace, and killing politesse. Even the passages of transcendent visual lyricism carry as much ache as they do beauty. I could watch it again and again; nothing seen all last year seems half so worth the musty term "work of art." Perhaps Terence Davies is the definitive self-conscious artist: his subject is pained self-consciousness within merciless social frameworks, and his craft makes poetry of the hopeless struggle to escape that frame.

THE END

back