By Alan Price
“Why can one never do a natural thing without screening it behind a structure of artifice?”
That observation by socialite Lily Bart encapsulates the mental trap she’s caught in: trying to negotiate her real feelings in a shallow society desperate to keep up appearances. She can never reconcile the two things and her life rapidly slides into tragedy.
Its upper-middle-class Boston in 1905 and we are in America’s Gilded Age. Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) is an impoverished socialite whose comfort and luxury are threatened. Lily lives with her younger cousin Grace (Jodhi May) and wealthy aunt Julia (Elinor Bron) where she survives on a small allowance that’s insufficient for her social climbing. Lily needs to marry and acquire the security of wealth but she’s no gold digger. She admires (maybe loves) lawyer Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz) but he’s too poor to consider marriage.
Lily attempts to increase her money by allowing businessman Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd) to invest her savings. At first this seems positive but leads to financial disaster. (“My genius is doing the wrong thing at the right time”). Lily then rebukes Trenor’s sexual advances (“You’re dodging the rules of the game, Lily.”) Lily’s social downfall begins. Too proud to marry solely for money she courts rich men but dismisses them and becomes an outsider in an artificial society, suffering downward social mobility (“I have joined the working classes.”) She messes up her work as a secretary for a wealthy Mrs Hatch (Lorelei King) and is forced to accept a demeaning position as a trainee milliner. Lily’s prospects are bleak.
One of the great pleasures of Terence Davies’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel is the screenplay and his concentrated direction of a superlative cast of actors who are on top form. Initially the dialogue (mainly drawn from the book) is barbed, epigrammatic and delivered in a ritualistic, combative manner. Gradually the pretence lessens. Lily breaks through the brittle surface and attempts to express her needs. On seeking marriage “a girl must…a man when he chooses” is sourly followed by Trenor’s weary summing up as it being “One dull fortune marrying another.”
Davies films these confrontations with a superb formal intimacy that unlike most period dramas doesn’t let the beauty of costumes and plush rooms suffocate the action. It’s a probing, minimalist approach concerned with the artifice of inner deception not the material. Everyone looks like they are in a John Singer Sergeant painting but delivers dialogue with an ironic subtext that wants to nakedly expose each other.
Yet biting critique though The House of Mirth is, it’s not an obvious Wildean or Jamesian satire of manners but a touching expression of female desire and the need for independence experienced through the eyes of Edith Wharton’s great character Lily. Though marriage and economic stability is Lily’s aim it also accompanies a wish for strong friendships with men too: only Lawrence Selden can offer her friendship, though at the end of The House of Mirth he expresses, too late, a deeper love for Lily. The wealthier you are the more that a female need for a male friend is frowned upon.
We observe Lily’s actions and gradually shift from a criticism of her methods (she’s both naïve and calculating) to sympathy for her well being. This is achieved by the large emotional range of Gilian Anderson’s performance. She is brilliant in the role: the film’s last fifteen minutes reveal Lily’s despair at the crushing realisation of her poverty and is heart-rending.
There is much talk in The House of Mirth yet its cinematic dialogue that’s constantly on the interrogative move. Perhaps there are less obvious visual set pieces in this Terence Davies’s film compared to his others but when they come they poetically convey the passage of time and transience of life (Such as the camera tracking away, accompanied by the calm voyage “Soave sia il vento,” trio from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, as the rain falls on the garden of the mansion house, closed down for the social season, is beautifully accomplished).
The House of Mirth was made five years after The Neon Bible (1995) and eight years on from Davies’s autobiographical masterpiece on childhood The Long Day Closes (1992). The Neon Bible was a fine, if flawed, piece of period Americana. The House of Mirth is the better period re-location shift and is for me one of Davies’s best films. It stands as a remarkable template for making period costume drama because it’s an anti costume-only drama: a raw, uncompromising, stripped down and stunning achievement. The film is an incisive critique of Gilded Age capitalism in America and how it restricted the agency of women.
This review first appeared in The London Grip
