Philadelphia Inquirer
‚X-Files‘ star does well by Wharton
By Desmond Ryan
Philadelphia Inquirer
Published: Friday, January 19, 2001
Terence Davies‘ thoughtful and elegantly rendered adaptation of Edith Wharton’s „The House of Mirth“ recognizes that the novel boasts one of the most bitterly ironic titles in American fiction.
Wharton chose it from the incontestable opinion in Ecclesiastes that „the heart of fools is in the house of mirth,“ and Davies is more successful in drawing out the book’s central irony than he is in capturing the molten rage that flows through it.
At the cold heart of „The House of Mirth“ is a woman doomed by a simple fact of life in the „haute monde“ of New York in 1905: Ideas of principle, honor and scruple should be publicly and vocally espoused, but they should be privately ignored when self-interest is an issue. Lily’s naive refusal to do as others do becomes her undoing.
In the opening scene, Lily emerges from clouds of steam spewed by a locomotive at Grand Central Station. Although the film tones down Wharton’s Lily into an emblematic wronged woman, she still comes across with precisely etched definition in Gillian Anderson’s wonderful reading. „The House of Mirth“ is a revelation for those who know Anderson only through her work on „The X-Files.“
Anderson’s Lily is strikingly beautiful, but too innocent and trusting to last long in a world that Wharton dissected so corrosively. She is 29 and the pressure is building to solve the quandary that faces any young woman of her class who is without a substantial income. And the dilemma poses another irony. By marrying wealth she can attain a measure of financial security, but only at the cost of her freedom and happiness.
She would choose Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz), a lawyer who lacks the kind of wealth needed to support the life she wants. Sim Rosedale (Anthony L aPaglia) is a businessman of vast and shadily obtained means who woos her. But Lily is repelled.
Hovering nearby and waiting his chance to make Lily his mistress is Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd). As Lily wavers, Trenor sows the first seeds of her destruction by supposedly investing her money in the stock market and making a modest killing. Or so she believes when she accepts the deeply compromising profits.
Lily’s is an extended martyrdom. She moves through fouled waters teeming with pirhanas. The one with the sharpest teeth is society matron Bertha Dorset (Laura Linney), who is Lily’s antithesis and ultimately her nemesis.
Davies has made some changes and shifts in his adaptation. He has wisely made Selden a more involving and sympathetic figure and, presumably in the name of political correctness, he has deleted references to Rosedale’s Jewishness that lent Wharton’s novel the taint of anti-Semitism.
This is not Wharton on the sumptuous scale of Martin Scorsese’s „The Age of Innocence.“ Glasgow, Scotland, stands in for New York. The strong evocation of time and place found in Scorsese’s film is missing here.
But if necessity forced Davies to film in tight spaces, it’s at least in keeping with his view of the novel that puts a woman in an inescapable trap. Or one that is inescapable for someone such as Lily Bart.
Anderson is in virtually every scene as the noose she cannot see draws tighter. The supporting cast defers to her, and if some of the characters have only one dimension – such as a swinish cad like Gus Trenor – they are at least executed deftly. And given the opportunity to enlarge on Selden, Stoltz fills him with tortured ambiguities.
This is very much Anderson’s film. The publication of the novel made Wharton’s reputation. The release of „The House of Mirth“ should do the same for Anderson.