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San Francisco Chronicle
A Fully Realized 'House'
Gillian Anderson rises to challenge of Wharton novel
Wesley Morris, Chronicle Movie Critic ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
Rating: Little man jumping out of his seat and clapping = highest rating!

The happiest thing about Terence Davies' "The House of Mirth" is that it's such a mesmerizing downer. Edith Wharton's 1905 novel was more than an exquisite chronicle of upper-echelon etiquette. It was, at its most forceful, parodic and vividly damning, an American tragedy. Davies ("Distant Voices, Still Lives," "The Neon Bible"), here at his least florid and most unaffected, fashions an adaptation with an equal measure of damnation.

Naturally, he's more expedient than Wharton. He's also more taken with the emotional amplitude in her book as opposed to the elaborate assassination of materialists implicit in her almost-love story. Like the book, the movie tells the saga of Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson), a self-constructed woman on the prowl for a husband in New York's more rarefied social circles.

Her lifestyle, which has been purchased mostly on credit, demands money in order to be maintained, and her debts need to be paid. So both because it's customary and because she has no fortune of her own, Lily has to find a man. The ones in this privileged utopia adore her; she loves only one. But as fate - - or at least Wharton's bitter version of it -- would have it, Lawrence Selden's (Eric Stoltz) wallet isn't to her liking, just his heart.

SOCIAL TRAGEDY

People will talk about a 29-year-old single girl with a number of suitors but none that converts to a marriage partner. Ensuing altercations, accompanied by Lily's own refusal to avenge herself when necessary, result in her eviction from Eden and set her on the road to ruin. It's sad to think that if she could have held on for 95 more years, she could have made the cut for "Sex and the City." Instead, she's ravaged by the tyranny of speculation and the fatality of gossip. In Lily Bart, "The House of Mirth" has a tragedian the size of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina -- but Davies delivers her without the visual and emotional opera.

Drawn to her resemblance to the women in John Singer Sargent paintings, Davies cast Anderson, who's best known for "The X-Files." On paper, that's a joke. It's something altogether less funny onscreen. Anderson's not the fully blossomed beauty Wharton imagined. She doesn't look like the other girls. To my mind, Anderson's a pre-cubist caricature of Greer Garson -- her prettiness as mildly awkward as her manner of speaking. It's fairly obvious, though, why Davies has visions of Sargent when he sees her. Anderson looks nothing if not eternally sad, and her face comes with its own narrative. The sight of her using it furtively to promote to us Lily's exasperation and increasing misery is transformative. The rest of the cast also seems only vaguely matched to Wharton's characters. But Davies' small gambles work.

VALIANT SUITOR

Stoltz is a less dashing Lawrence Selden than the one we crave. Still, aided by oily red hair that matches Anderson's burnt-orange tendrils, he's never looked cleaner or seemed more valiant. Playing a composite of Lily's jealous cousin Grace Stepney and the sorely missed Gerty Farish, Jodhi May makes a persuasive bid for tissues and hugs. Laura Linney makes a perfectly glacial and backstabbing Bertha Dorset, and as Gus Trenor, the married man who expects "payment" for investing Lily's money, Dan Aykroyd is a strange but appropriately blustery fit. Anthony LaPaglia has been chosen to complete Davies' drastic toning-down of potential husband Sim Rosedale, excising the tricky anti-Semitism in the book by creating a character who does not appear to be Jewish. Eleanor Bron, as Lily's uptight, gossip-addicted aunt, is the most dead-on casting move. Davies' humanism and mild surrealism are unlikely fit to Wharton's ornate contempt, too. "Mirth" is steeped in a nearly somnambulant languor. Like Davies' other movies, this one seems to be fighting the urge to wake up from a dream. Society, though, still has fangs, which Davies sharpens courtesy of various nips and tucks to Wharton's prose. The changes are crucial but brilliant in how they redefine the scope and nature of Lily's victimhood. It's the narrative equivalent of adjusting the hang of a portrait. He can't bring himself to gossip (at one point he turns the whispering into a sonic monstrosity). Nor does he condone the opulence that's swallowing Lily.

The film is recalibrated to suit his own impressions of his heroine's doom. In Martin Scorsese's film of Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," he found the boundaries of romantic and social possession tragic. Among other things, "The Age of Innocence" was stuck on the erotics of repression. Davies' "House of Mirth" is about the poetics of self-denial. Why can't Lily take a man, any man? Too often she stands at the precipice of a matrimonial forever, and the view simply makes her sick. The commitment is a sentence that its spoils can't justify. So, politely, she declines.

Taken cumulatively, the movie is a steely requiem for the independent heart.

Lily's never certain what she wants. The dinners, the retreats, the cruises are all some elaborate piece of theater, and Lily, while never entirely certain of her role, is desperate to perform. Her trouble is that she has too many audiences, and the reviews are mixed. Ultimately, the demands of Wharton's particular brand of show business wear her out. Anderson has a face engineered for these sorts of exhausting contradictions. One curtain falls, and boldly, up rises another. Her performance is a study in the difference between hubris and pride, remarkable for how unshowy but profoundly devastating it is. I've kept my exposure to "The X-Files" to a minimum for such an occasion.

THE END

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