House of Mirth

By The Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

The film made from this novel has nothing subtle about it; and that's really the source of my problem with it. From the opening shot of Lily Bart's dark silhouette moving Mysteriously toward the camera to the final tableau, the visual style has a cartoonish feel, as if the project is still at the storyboard stage. Great attention is paid to costume and location, and each individual shot looks beautiful; but ultimately, the director's visual imagination is not particularly original or inventive, and after a while the film is fairly boring to watch. The director, while inventing a number of Artistic shots which seemed gratuitous (the prime example being the transition from New York to the Riviera, which begins by confusing the viewer and ends with a serious compositional mistake) misses some golden opportunities offered by the actual text. Particularly disappointing is his throwaway shot of the tableau in which Lily appears as Summer, which is offerend with absoultely no context and is therefore transformed from an important symbolic representation of the relationship between Lily and her society into a piece of unreadable weirdness that's over before you have time to go "Hullo? What?" The script itself is not so much an interpretation of the novel as a summary of it; enough dialogue is used to give us a sense for what's happening in the scene, but most of the shading has disappeared. The acting style matches the visuals: slow, ponderous, and monumental, as if the characters are all performing underwater, or on Quaaludes. (Grace Stepney, in particular, appears to be heavily sedated.) People move slowly, smile slowly, and speak slowly, and it's so consistent that it has to be a directorial decision rather than a problem with the individual actors. The effect is a kind of studied artificiality--nothing that comes out of these peoples' mouths sounds natural, any more than the way they move their bodies or interact with each other seems natural. Now, I can understand where Trevor Davies was coming from with this, since the artificiality of this society is something that Wharton is clearly attempting to foreground; but I don't think the glacial pace was the best way to convey that. The whole point is that Lily is attracted to society not for the sake of the money itself but because she likes things to be bright, lively, fast, and furious--and the last thing that anyone or anything in this film appears to be is lively.

Which is a shame, because we know from Gillian Anderson's TV appearances that she's perfectly capable of doing lively. Nevertheless, her Lily Bart is as much a prisoner of this directing style as the other characters. The one good thing about her performance is that it show she's capable of handling a much broader range than Chris Carter has ever trusted her with. Liza was critical of her dependence on the "heaving alabaster bosom" method, but I prefer to attribute that to the corsets. Especially toward the end when Lily's situation and her responses to it become more desperate, I think GA acquitted herself very well. Less successful is Eric Stolz, who is just wrong as Lawrence Selden. The only rationale I can think of for using him was that perhaps Hugh Grant was unavailable...and even then, this character definitiely did NOT need to be played by a pleasant-looking bland pretty boy who's good for nothing but smirking and looking arch. In the novel, both Selden himself and Selden's interest in Lily Bart are more complex--and less predicated on purely physical attraction. Meanwhile the excellent job done by the actor playing Rosedale is undercut by the script's failure to deal with the issue of his Jewishness. In the novel it is very clear that Rosedale's difficulties in getting into society--and Lily's initial revulsion toward him--are directly related to his being a Jew, whereas from the film you wouldn't even know that he is a Jew unless you're sharp enough to pick up on the veiled references to his financial dealings. Also cut from the script is the story of Lily's own upbringing in her riches-to-rags family, which has the effect of flattening her character and simplifying her motivations. The actress playing Bertha Dorset (I think it's Laura Linney) does do a marvelous icy bitch queen, and the woman playing Lily's aunt Julia has one great scene, but most of the other characters are drawn very roughly and move like cardboard cutouts.

For those interested purely in the Gillian Anderson ogling factor, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, she sure is on screen a lot. On the other, she is almost always encased in Edwardian dresses, most of which cover her entire body, and only one of which shows any cleavage. Aside from one drop- dead red opera dress complete with feather fan, most of these outfits are not particularly exciting. There are numerous very pretty shots of her standing by a window through which light is streaming, and two scenes in which she locks lips with Eric Stolz. Otherwise, if you just want to watch GA's hot, lithe little bod, you're better off watching this year's X-Files. If you turn down the sound, you can make up your own dialogue, and probably end up with a viewing experience more interesting than this movie.

As I said, this may be partly colored by our appreciation of the novel; but I think a lot of these problems would affect anyone who hadn't read the novel, especially the pacing. At two and a half hours, this film feels a darn sight longer than Titanic, and despite the extremely leisurely pace of the dialogue and movement the plot advances in such jerky installments that it's sometimes difficult to understand how we got from Scene A to Scene B. It's hard sometimes not to laugh at the strained quality of the acting (especially in Lily's scenes with Selden, which I blame entirely on Stolz and the director). I'm glad I saw it just so I know; but I think that both as an adaptation of the novel and as a film in its own right, this movie never makes it past mediocre. I hope it will lead to better things for Gillian Anderson, who is clearly ready for them; but if you want to see it, hurry, because I don't expect it to last long.