The House of Mirth

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New York City, 1905. Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) steps daintily off a train, into a swirl of steam and shadows. Her silhouette erect and her skirts slightly rustling, Lily makes her way inside the station, where she’s dwarfed by its elaborate architecture and swallowed by its darkness. When she spots a friend, Lawrence Seldon (Eric Stoltz), the camera cuts to Lily’s veiled face, pale and faintly smiling. Seldon invites her to visit his apartment down the street, which, he promises, will offer respite from the summer heat. Lily pauses, then looks up at Seldon from beneath the brim of her exquisite hat. "I’ll take the risk," she says.

When Lily makes this decision during the first few moments of Terence Davies’ film adaptation of The House of Mirth, she is, in effect, sealing her fate. Even though she knows that a proper young lady should not be visiting a young man’s apartment during the afternoon, alone, she does it anyway. This decision in itself tells you pretty much all you need to know about Lily Bart: She’s willful, ambitious and, for all her worldly affectations, tragically naïve. And in this insightful depiction, the movie closely follows its source, Edith Wharton’s novel, which, on its publication in 1905, created a stir among members of New York’s upper class, whom it depicts as prejudiced, hypocritical and pathologically materialistic — and that’s just for starters. Much like her friend, Henry James, Wharton made it her literary business to expose the uglier aspects of the Gilded Age; she mounted her critique with a subtly biting prose that mirrored the indirect language and highly refined manners of her subjects.

This small-minded gentility is a double-edged sword for Lily: she sees and resists its restrictiveness, but also, at some deeply self-destructive level, abides by its rules. She hates the idea that she must marry well to maintain her social standing (her own inheritance is not enough), but she also wants that standing. And so she’s stuck between non-options. While the snooty folks in her circle judge Lily harshly for smoking cigarettes and flirting with Seldon (even though they tolerate his discreet affair with one of her wealthy married friends), she also can’t bring herself to accept a marriage proposal from an outsider to that circle, Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia), who is newly rich, following some smart "investments," and Jewish, or at least, Wharton names his Jewishness; the film does not, and so backs off indicting both Lily and her friends for their anti-Semitism.

This backing off suggests that Davies’ film is, like the novel, shaped by its own historical time. Perhaps this is why it is something of an "interactive" movie, asking its viewers to participate actively in unraveling characters’ motivations. To that end, though it follows a more linear plot than Davies’ previous work (for example, his impressionistic Distant Voices, Still Lives), the film retains the director’s signature attention to visual detail, with quasi-melodramatic close-ups and dark interiors standing in for explanatory dialogue or monologues. Unlike the novel — or Martin Scorsese’s film of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which had Joanne Woodward reading Wharton’s prose throughout — Davies’ House of Mirth depends almost wholly on surfaces to tell its story. Occasionally, a character might explicate a plot point, but for the most part, you have to keep up with what you see on the screen — where characters are positioned in a room, what clothes they’re wearing, what looks they exchange.

This strategy is fitting for the film’s central theme, a class-based obsession with surfaces, the ways they deceive and protect, as well as reveal, secrets and betrayals, but also loyalties. The characters, for all their erudition, can’t say or show what they mean; it’s against the rules, even if they do know what they mean, which isn’t always the case. Even Lily, who wants desperately to flout convention, can only find the nerve to do so in small and costly ways. And so, despite that fact that her Aunt Penniston (Eleanor Bron) repeatedly warns her not to gamble at cards, Lily does, so that eventually, she’s so deeply in debt that she has to get a job at a milliners’. Heaven forfend!

Of all her naughtiness, it’s Lily’s friendship with Seldon that does her the most harm. Because he works for a modest living (as a lawyer), Seldon is an unsuitable husband. She’s drawn to his witty disdainfulness, which on its surface, matches hers. The fact that he’s played here by Stoltz is almost too perfect; the actor is at his bland, arrogant and spineless-seeming best, and so gives away Seldon’s inadequacies to the rest of us before Lily realizes them. (I think the last time Stoltz was so well used was as Jennifer Lopez’s comatose boyfriend in Anaconda.) When Seldon makes a smug face or juts his little chin, you just know that Lily has made a dire misjudgment. Their scenes together are tense with something resembling sexuality, but the film never gives over completely to Lily’s sense of things. When they actually kiss one fateful evening, the camera is uncomfortably close on Lily’s lips as she whispers that she loves him, and then pulls out to remind you that they’re surrounded by fellow guests at a swank party. The fantasy is short-lived.

More often, the film shows Lily and Seldon as they appear to others, engaged in sneery, observational repartee, like kids at a party where they feel left out. At times they resemble the very people they despise; though the movie pits Lily against a powerful social rival, Bertha Dorset (the superb Laura Linney) and Lily’s own resentful cousin Grace (Jodhi May), it also makes clear that Lily is fooling herself. She and Seldon are as hypocritical and self-serving as any of them. And this, according to Davies’ film, is precisely the damage done. Lily, for all her insight into the dangers and meannesses of her social circle, can’t see her way out of it — even when she believes she is cast out of it. By asking you to see what Lily cannot — but only in the delicate and insidious terms that she somehow misses (or willfully ignores) — Davies’ House of Mirth is a particularly artful mirror, turned on two hypocritical surfaces, the Gilded Age and also on our own.

See the trailer!