PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
You know a film is bad when the reviews and descriptions carry on about
things like costumes and set design. And let me tell you, the costumes
and set design in The House of Mirth are pretty darn good. Yes, they
sure are. Production designer Don Taylor (Brassed Off) and costumer
Monica Howe (Bugsy Malone) do a very admirable job of recreating 1905
New York City. Yup.
Okay – here's the deal. Mirth, based on Edith Wharton's novel, is an awful film that features some of the worst acting to deface the big screen in quite some time. The X-Files' Gillian Anderson is so howlingly awful in the lead role, it actually boggles the imagination. Of course, I could be way off-base here - Anderson won a British Independent Film Award (beating the likes of Brenda Blethyn, Julie Walters and Emily Watson), while the director and the film also nabbed nominations (losing, thankfully, to the impeccable Billy Elliot)
Set in turn-of-the-century Manhattan, Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart (Anderson), a young socialite in the upper crust of New York society. She's one of the city's most eligible young women and the envy of her highbrow female friends because of it. Lily doesn't have a reliable source of income and must find a husband that will be able to support her and the lavish lifestyle she has grown accustomed to by living with her wealthy aunt (Eleanor Bron, A Little Princess).
Despite his lack of earnings, Lily falls for a lawyer named Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz, Anaconda). Although Lily is hot for Selden, she won't marry him because he's poor. When Lily is spotted leaving Selden's apartment, she finds herself blackmailed by a social-climbing property owner (Anthony LaPaglia, Autumn in New York). Throw in a couple of bad business investments, mounting gambling debt, a drinking problem and being turned away by her aunt, and Lily starts slipping down the social ladder so quickly, she barely touches the rungs.
Mirth is broken up into two sections, with one showing Lily struggling
to find the right man and the other concentrating on her descent into
the gutter. At the halfway mark, you'll be wondering whether Lily is
too goddamn lazy or too hung up on her pride to – oh, I don't know – get
off her back and get a job. Lily is a portrayed as a victim, and the
story is supposed to show how horrible it is when women had to depend on
men. Women had to marry to obtain any kind of social status, while men
had a choice, and
There's a fine line between a pace that's methodical and a pace that's boring, and Mirth writer/director Terence Davies (The Neon Bible) opts for the latter. To make matters worse, the story doesn't come close to having a sympathetic character. The women are all unlikeable, and the men are even worse.
I love Anderson on The X-Files, and though the casting of her may have seemed daring and edgy, it's all wrong. Think about it – the only non-Scully role she's landed was in Playing By Heart, which was hardly awe-inspiring. And Anderson isn't the only character miscast here. Mirth features a string of unbelievable casting blunders, with Stoltz following quickly behind Anderson with one of the year's worst performances. There's a reason nobody has seen the last 10 films this guy has made. If chemistry were measured on a scale of 1 to 10, the sparks between Anderson and Stoltz would manage to pull in a negative number. When Dan Aykroyd is the best part of an acting ensemble, viewers should head for the hills. The actors perform as if Davies pumped sleeping gas into the set every morning (something I wish they did to the theatre at my screening of this film).
It's films like this that scare people from reading classic novels by the likes of Wharton, Henry James and Thomas Hardy. For every five great film versions of a period piece based on a popular novel (like Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove and Michael Winterbottom's Jude), it only takes one as bad as Mirth to tear down everything built up by its far superior brethren.
2:20 – PG for boredom-inducing thematic material
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews