Terence Davies is a filmmaker famous (or as famous as an obscure English director can be) for his free-flowing, autobiographical memory-pieces. Time and again, in films like The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies eschews straightforward storytelling for a fragmented, impressionistic narrative thread that might very well be taking place in the mind of the film's protagonist. In some circles, Davies' cinematic tone poems are admired (although not by me), mostly for their considerable aesthetic beauty and the purity of their self-confessional approach. But the movies also seem, at least to this reviewer, so haphazardly structured and so self-consciously artsy, that they're often a struggle to sit through.
Davies' new film, The House of Mirth, flies in the face of just about everything we've come to expect from Davies. That's not to say it's a particularly good movie, but at least it's something we didn't anticipate.
For starters, The House of Mirth tells its story in a traditional, resolutely linear fashion, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and exactly in that order. Also, Davies is not working from his own personal memory pool here, or even adapting an original story of his own devising. The House of Mirth is based on a century-old novel of the same name by Edith Wharton, and Davies reins in his more abstract impulses to offer up a surprisingly faithful, no-nonsense rendering. The truth of the matter is that the film could have used an infusion of nonsense — or at least something that feels alive — because Davies' The House of Mirth, faithful though it may be, is a decidedly dry and bloodless affair, not to mention a depressing one.
Gillian Anderson stars as Lily Bart, a bright and attractive but ultimately doomed socialite gliding through the parlors, drawing rooms and country estates of turn-of-the-century New York. Lily initially appears perfectly at home in the comely but utterly insincere world of class-conscious New York society, but it soon becomes evident she's just a little bit desperate, and that slightest hint of desperation is sniffed out by the other bluebloods, making Lily vulnerable prey. In a sphere where every aspect of life is defined by surface appearances and social expectations, Lily is on the hunt for a husband, a rich one — which means someone other than her friend and confidant Lawrence Seldon (Eric Stoltz), even though she's obviously in love with him, or something very close to it.
Complications set in when Seldon's old flame, the sweet-faced but quietly venomous Bertha Dorset (Laura Linney), discovers her former lover's affections for Lily and so, naturally, decides to bring about Lily's ruin. Back-stabbing Bertha is aided in this malicious game not just by the wealthy Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd), who invests Lily's money and then goes ballistic when she won't repay the favor with sex, but by the whole of New York society. One by one, Lily's former friends and family members turn their backs on her as the lies and gossip snowball into a sticky, destructive mass that effectively ends the young woman's social climbing and eventually sucks her under.
The dog-eat-dog, East Coast upper crust milieu depicted in The House of Mirth is an alien environment likely to strike most contemporary viewers as a place as mysterious and off-putting as the surface of Mars. Davies does a decent enough job of making this world watchable (in a reliable, Masterpiece Theatre sort of way), and to some degree even manages to delineate its internal logic, follies and hierarchies, but it never really becomes interesting. The mood here is more chilly than it needs to be. The pace plods and the actors stand around too often looking like they're posing rather than performing. Stoltz comes off particularly smug and wooden, and Aykroyd sometimes seems as if he's reading his lines off cue cards. Anderson fares a bit better but isn't completely convincing either, which presents yet another problem since she's in virtually every scene.
The film becomes even more problematic after Bertha has delivered the death blow to Lily and decimated her social standing. Lily continues to stagger about mortally wounded for the remainder of the movie, like a bloody bull with a score of matador's swords sticking up out of its hide. She goes from one old friend and family member to the next, begging for help, for enough money to stay alive, and gets slapped down at every turn. To each she responds with a polite smile and a quiet "Thank you," and with each encounter she seems to disappear a little bit more. Davies (and, in a sense, Wharton) position Lily in an impossible social situation, painting her into a dark, dingy corner and then simply leaving her there for the film's final half hour. It's a painful, tedious process, and more than a little infuriating to watch.
The film's title, in case you hadn't guessed by now, goes way past irony into a realm that might best be thought of as a tragedy of manners. Davies is obviously in search of a tone here that's both dramatic and intimate, but The House of Mirth mostly just feels cramped and constricted, like a forgettable piece of chamber music. The film looks as elegantly handsome as your run-of-the-mill Merchant-Ivory production, but that's not nearly enough. The style is far too static, many of the key performances are hopelessly rigid, and the subject is portrayed as little more than a dull, dead end, all of which makes The House of Mirth a joyless and uninviting experience.
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2001.