The House of Mirth
UK/USA 2000
Reviewed by Kevin Jackson
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
New York, 1905-7. Lily Bart, a young lady of slender means, arrives in New York and meets her friend Lawrence Selden, a bookish bachelor, who invites her to his flat. Leaving, Lily is spotted by rich businessman Sim Rosedale. Staying at the country retreat of friends Judy and Gus Trenor, Lily woos the wealthy but boring Percy Gryce, but he rejects her advances on learning of her gambling debts. Later, she and Lawrence kiss, although they skirt the issue of marriage. When staying at the country house of her aunt, Mrs Peniston, who pays her a modest allowance, Lily purchases letters which reveal that Lawrence had an affair with married socialite Bertha. On hearing of her money difficulties, Gus Trenor offers to invest Lily's savings, and introduces her to Rosedale, whose offer of marriage she refuses. Later, after he reveals he used his own money to augment her savings, Gus makes a move on Lily, which she angrily rejects. Gus then demands she pay back the money he invested for her.
Facing mounting debts, Lily joins Bertha and her husband George on vacation in Monte Carlo, not realising that Bertha is using her as a shield for an affair. Bertha then accuses her of seducing George. Outcast by her circle, left only a small sum when her aunt dies, and unwilling to use the incriminating letters to tarnish Bertha, Lily falls down the social scale, from secretary to drudgery in a milliner's to unemployment and chloral addiction. Bertha visits Selden and throws his letters into the fire. Using a loan from Rosedale to pay off her debt to Trenor, Lily takes a lethal dose of chloral; Selden - having retrieved the letters from the fire - discovers her body.
Review
"The world is vile," murmurs one of Lily Bart's few loyal allies, Carry Fisher, as she reflects sadly on the cruel stupidity with which their social circle has cast out and is gradually destroying her young friend. In Edith Wharton's novel, it is Lily herself who speaks the line, but writer-director Terence Davies is wise to have changed it: it resonates in his film as a grimly impartial summing-up, not as the personal grievance of a lady who has run out of luck. For the world of The House of Mirth is indeed largely vile, one in which the unprincipled and vigorously hypocritical, like Gus Trenor and Bertha Dorset, tend to triumph while the idealistic (Lily grows braver, less venal and more magnanimous as her worldly fortunes fail) are branded as immoral and ruined, unless cushioned, like Lily's lover Selden, by enough money and the appropriate chromosomes.
This beady-eyed view of the early 20th-century's nouveaux riches (a rather different tribe from the Old New Yorkers of The Age of Innocence, but no less savage at heart) was Wharton's own, and Davies has preserved its astringent spirit in bringing it to the screen. It's rare that a period film, however seriously intended, doesn't fall at least half in love with its fancy frocks and immaculate crockery, but The House of Mirth is quite different. Though handsomely designed (by Don Taylor) and lovingly shot (by Remi Adefarasin) - there's one dissolve, from pellets of rain lashing the surface of a cold pond to the softly glowing waters of the Mediterranean, that's almost excessively gorgeous - it never loses sight of the fact that the pretty graces of this world are also, as it were, the trophies of barbarism.
Wharton was keenly interested in the writings of her contemporary Thorstein Veblen, the first sociologist to make the insolent comparison between the leisure classes and ancient warrior hordes; Veblen, one suspects, would have appreciated the unbeglamoured eye of Davies' film. Indeed, far from diluting the remorseless quality of Wharton's social tragedy with the familiar backward-glancing nostalgia of most costume pieces, Davies has, if anything, accentuated its melancholy.
A modest budget no doubt played the decisive part in having Lily walk on to the screen alone at the beginning of the film, rather than weaving her way through the afternoon crush of Grand Central, but the effect is more than apt: the image of Lily emerging from a cloud of railway steam evokes Anna Karenina, and hints proleptically at her sticky end. And when we arrive at that sticky end, Davies certainly out-does Wharton in bleakness: where the novel's heroine drifts off into a more or less accidental drugged sleep and the soothing fantasy of nursing a child, the film terminates in unambiguous suicide.
As with Davies' trilogy of autobiographical short films, there are sequences in The House of Mirth (the misleading title, taken from the Old Testament, was applied by newspapers to an insurance scandal of 1905) so gloomy they border on the excruciating; as in those shorts, the redemptive qualities here are eloquence, precision and grace. If Gillian Anderson's first scenes bear the inescapable trace of her role in The X Files, she rapidly sheds it. Apart from her un-Lily-like inability to pronounce French words appropriately, she is not merely plausible but exceptionally powerful, and she makes Lily's final self-lacerating encounter with Selden horribly real.
Anderson more than vindicates Davies' idiosyncratic casting decision (as, in a different register, does Dan Aykroyd, whose smug violence as Trenor is miles away from anything he's shown on screen before), and lends both sympathy and dignity to a character who could too easily provoke - as she sometimes appears to provoke even in Edith Wharton - impatience and scorn. Fine as she is, though, the film's finest quality is its typically quiet attentiveness to tone of voice, posture, nuances of facial expression - Anderson proves herself a grand mistress of that most elusive look, the crestfallen. It's a remarkable, if sometimes harrowing adaptation: beautifully intelligent, intelligently beautiful.
Credits
- Director
- Terence Davies
- Producer
- Olivia Stewart
- Screenplay
- Terence Davies
- Based on the novel by
- Edith Wharton
- Director of Photography
- Remi Adefarasin
- Editor
- Michael Parker
- Production Designer
- Don Taylor
- ©Granada Film Limited and FilmFour Limited
- Production Companies
- Granada presents in association with The Arts Council of England/ FilmFour/The Scottish Arts Council/Showtime/ Glasgow Film Fund a Three Rivers production
- Developed with the support of the MEDIA Programme of the European Union
- Supported by the National Lottery through The Arts Council of England and The Scottish Arts Council
- Glasgow Film Fund is financed by the Glasgow Development Agency and the City of Glasgow Council
- With the kind support of the Glasgow Film Office
- Executive Producers
- Bob Last
- Pippa Cross
- Co-producer
- Alan J. Wands
- Production Co-ordinator
- Mandy McKay
- Production Manager
- Wendy Broom
- Unit Manager
- Tony Hood
- Location Managers
- Sarah Lee
- 2nd Unit:
- Valerie Bresso
- Tony Hood
- Post-production
- Supervisor:
- Sarah Lee
- Co-ordinator:
- Anita M. Patel
- Consultant:
- Michael Solinger
- 2nd Unit Director/ Supervisor
- Sarah Lee
- Assistant Directors
- Guy Travers
- William Booker
- Nanna Mailand-Hansen
- Script Supervisor
- Pat Rambaut
- Casting
- Billy Hopkins
- Suzanne Smith
- Kerry Barden
- Additional:
- Julia Duff
- 2nd Unit Photography
- Chris Plevin
- Visual Effects
- Peerless Camera Co London
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- Stuart Murdoch
- 2nd Unit:
- Ricky Farns
- Additional Editing
- Martin Brinkler
- Art Directors
- Diane Dancklefsen
- Location:
- Jo Graysmark
- Set Decorator
- John Bush
- Costume Designer
- Monica Howe
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Ann Taylor Cowan
- Hair/Make-up
- Jan Harrison Shell
- Gillian Anderson:
- Eva Marieges Moore
- Make-up/Hair Artists
- Meg Speirs
- Dianne Millar
- Chrissie Powers
- Musical Director
- Adrian Johnston
- Conductor
- Terry Davies
- Music Supervisor
- Heather Bownass
- Engineer
- Nigel Acott
- Soundtrack
- "Oboe Concerto in D minor slow movement" - Ferenc Erkel Chamber Orchestra; "String Quartet no.2 in D" - Borodin String Quartet; "Cosi Fan Tutte - La mia Dorabella", "Cosi Fan Tutte - Soave sia il vento" - Slovak Philharmonic Chorus;, "Rondo" from "3rd String Quartet"; "Shtiler Shtiler" - Melanie Pappenheim; "The Lark" menuet allegretto third movement" - the Hagen Quartett; "Cosi Fan Tutte - Overture"- Orchestra & Chorus "La Petite Bande"; "Rohtko Chapel - movement 4" - Melanie Pappenheim
- Sound Recordist
- Louis Kramer
- Re-recording Mixer
- Paul Hamblin
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Catherine Hodgson
- Dialogue Editor
- Stewart Henderson
- ADR Mixer
- Ted Swanscott
- Foley
- Mixer:
- Ted Swanscott
- Editor:
- Michael Redfern
- Horses/Carriages
- Debbie Kaye
- Cast
- Gillian Anderson
- Lily Bart
- Dan Aykroyd
- Gus Trenor
- Eleanor Bron
- Mrs Peniston
- Terry Kinney
- George Dorset
- Anthony LaPaglia
- Sim Rosedale
- Laura Linney
- Bertha Dorset
- Jodhi May
- Grace Stepney
- Elizabeth McGovern
- Carry Fisher
- Eric Stoltz
- Lawrence Selden
- Penny Downie
- Judy Trenor
- Pearce Quigley
- Percy Gryce
- Helen Coker
- Evie Van Osburgh
- Mary MacLeod
- Mrs Haffen
- Paul Venables
- Jack Stepney
- Serena Gordon
- Gwen Stepney
- Lorelei King
- Mrs Hatch
- Linda Marlowe
- Madame Regina
- Anne Marie Timoney
- Miss Haines
- Claire Higgins
- Mrs Bry
- Ralph Riach
- Lord Hubert Dacy
- Brian Pettifer
- Mr Bry
- Philippe de Groussouvre
- Ned Silverton
- Trevor Martin
- Jennings the butler
- David Ashton
- lawyer
- Lesley Harcourt
- Mattie Gormer
- Mark Dymond
- Paul Morpeth
- Pamela Dwyer
- Edith Fisher
- Kate Wooldridge
- parlour maid
- Graham Crammond
- clerk
- Roy Sampson
- Dorset butler
- Alyxis Daly
- landlady
- Joanne Bett
- Mary Goonan
- Gowan Calder
- Morag Siller
- millinery girls
- Certificate
- PG
- Distributor
- Film Four Distributors
- 12,635 feet
- 140 minutes 24 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- In Colour
- 2.35:1 [Hawk Anamorphic]