THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Sony Pictures Classics Director: Terence Davies Writer: Terence Davies, novel by Edith Wharton Cast: Gillian Anderson, Eric Stoltz, Dan Aykroyd, Eleanor Bron, Terry Kinney, Anthony LaPaglia, Laura Linney, Jodhi May, Elizabeth McGovern
I know a woman--and I'm sure you are familiar with the type as well--who was the daughter of a moderately successful professional man but who wanted far more wealth and status than she was afforded. She herself married a highly successful lawyer and made her home in one of the toniest burgs of New York's Long Island communities. She allegedly taught second grade for a year or two (though I doubt her word on this), and to this day regularly chats with her pals about the accoutrements of the family's latest auto, the most recent trip to Provence or Tuscany, or the $100 repast she enjoyed with her group of ladies who lunch, which she calls money well spent because "I'm worth it." At the same time she has no hesitations about confiding in what her latest psychiatrist told her "the one I got after I fired the last guy who did me no good" or about the handsome European man she once met just before her marriage, "the one I always wonder about...whether I should have accepted his proposal instead." This is a woman in conflict, a very rich woman who dimly realizes that her life is empty, that she never had any real work or identity of her own.
Edith Wharton's partly autobiographical "The House of Mirth," which deals with yet another individual who is of the manor born but who, through a combination of her own arrogance and thoughtlessness overwhelms her basic integrity and contempt for hypocrisy meets a tragic fate, has been successfully adapted into a richly textured drama. Filmmaker Terence Davies--who, though a methodical pace and a wise refusal to make even his own dialogue sound too contemporary--has brought to vivid life the compromises that prominent women had to make as recently as the turn of the Twentieth Century to keep their position. When reputation counted for all and a willingness to play by all the rules of social convention was the only ticket to maintaining a position in polite society, a decent woman with a mind of her own had to accommodate herself to an often suffocating existence in a world ruled thoroughly by men. While Terence Davies' "The House of Mirth" could be called a film celebrating our current age of women's liberation, such a stamp reduces the film to mere propaganda when in fact the story is at heart a biting satire on a venal, insincere cosmos of political and social backstabbing and of pathetic compromises.
In the central role of Lily Bart, Gillian Anderson ("The X- Files") inhabits the guise of a woman who is described by Miss Wharton at one point as "vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine," and who as such is a welcome albeit risky casting choice by Mr. Davies. While another filmmaker might have gone with, say, Helena Bonham-Carter, Ms. Anderson--who cannot be called a young, blushing beauty, displays the bounce that made her the perfect choice to play Special Agent Scully opposite her TV co-star David Duchovny in the long-running series. Displaying a brash indifference to social convention, her character, Lily Bart, opens the movie by accepting an invitation to tea by man-about-town lawyer Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz)--inside his New York apartment! Though unmarried now and in her late twenties, Ms. Bart takes the first step toward a slow descent in position after begin spotted leaving the building by its owner, the fabulously rich Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia), a fellow who is both feared and respected by others in New York society and yet whose identity as a Jew--so pronounced in Wharton's novel--remains strangely unmentioned in the film.
Flirtatious to a fault, Lily is obviously in lust with Selden but no union of marriage or even of much physicality takes place because for her part, Lily is unwilling to combine forces with a fellow who, relative to othes of her acquaintance, is poor, while Selden--who seems to teach Lily that the conventions of polite society are empty--is himself unwilling to break with those very rules. In other words, Selden is the story's leading sellout.
With Ms. Anderson in virtually every scene, scripter-director Davies takes us slowly and patiently into her decline, tightening the noose almost imperceptibly during the 140- minute piece so that we are scarcely aware until the cataclysmic conclusion that Lily has been both lanced by society and a victim of self-inflicted wounds. The gambling debts that transform her from a grande dame who believes she has the world under her thumb thanks to her beauty and charm become but a factor contributing to her loss of reputation. More important--and more cinematic as well--are the by the ways that others in her little world use her to satisfy their selfish ambitions. Ms. Wharton's heroine joins the likes of the eponymous character in Francois Truffaut's 1975 film "The Story of Adele H," done in ironically enough by her decency and her stupidity.
Whether this film works for you or not depends on your capacity to enjoy a story that is uncompromisingly a period piece, rich in costumes and even stilted in dialogue--all the more to encourage us to think of the very contemporary resonance that this director's decision evokes. Davies shows us not simply the avaricious and venomous nature of New York society in 1905, but by extension demonstrates Edith Wharton's own cynicism about the world in general. Just as Lily's "friend," Bertha Dorset played by the marvelous Laura Linney as a bubbly, adulterous good-time-girl, is perfectly willing to throw her buddy to the wolves to protect her own reputation, so are politicians and businesspeople and, yes, even the ordinary guy on the street agreeable to stab us in the back when this suits their own ends. As rich investor Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd) demands sex as the price for subsidizing Lily's waning fortune, so are many of us today agreeable to demanding favors of woman whom they take out to dinner and for whom they buy expensive presents.
While we can criticize Davies and Wharton alike for displaying men as one-dimensional fixtures, some perhaps even as plot devices, we should understand that Ms. Anderson's Lily is in every way the axis around which an entire organization evolves. Though Eleanor Bron's performance as Lily's rich aunt, Mrs. Peniston, is a caricature worthy of Oscar Wilde's counterpart in "The Importance of Being Earnest," Dan Aykroyd does fine in a serious role as a male chuavinist pig, Eric Stoltz as a cool, conflicted playboy, and Anthony LaPaglia as a complex person who withdraws his offer of marriage when he no longer sees Lily as a trophy bride. Talk about contemporary resonance! If tragedy is about bad things happening to a good person, this "House of Mirth" easily justifies the irony in its very title.
Not Rated. Running time: 140 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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