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Davies' House of Mirth captures the author's intentions
by Adrienne Martini
Edith Wharton may be one of the most underrated humorists of the modern age. The contradiction between the title The House of Mirth and its almost mirth-free story is great enough to choke a chuckle out of anyone.
Wharton's pen skewered the high society of the Gilded Age with deadly accuracy, but her work tends to get lost in the crowd once Mark Twain boisterously shows up at the party—fashionably late, of course. Perhaps Wharton doesn't get the credit she deserves simply because of her sex or, perhaps, because she turned her back on the States and moved to France. Maybe it's because too many of us were forced to read Ethan Fromme at too early an age, or it could simply be because her characters can feel somewhat bloodless, too mired in manners and proper behavior to be at all interesting. But while the surface of her work seems still, Wharton pretty blatantly churns up the muck of that era's social system that the common folk weren't supposed to see.
Which is what 1993's Martin Scorsese-helmed adaptation of a Wharton classic, Age of Innocence, missed. The surface of the film was gorgeous, full of rich detail and the perfect faces of Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis, but Wharton's biting commentary—the heart of the story—was overlooked in favor of one more shot of the hopelessly lovestruck Pfeiffer and her quivering upper lip.
The cultural difference between Scorsese and Wharton may have been too great—sure they both grew up in the Big Apple, but in wildly different environments. Take, for example, the ways in which social missteps were handled—in Wharton's world, you were ostracized, in Scorsese's you were dead. Maybe you have to hop across the pond to appreciate what Wharton is trying to do; after all, British culture still has a better grasp on the sorts of rigid class systems that this segment of the American upper crust was emulating.
Regardless of whether it was his cultural inheritance that fostered understanding, British writer/director Terence Davies has latched onto the social critique lurking in The House of Mirth and sucked it dry. The result is a gorgeous and smart film that captures Wharton's intent. And while the ending is inevitable, the path leading up to it never fails to be interesting.
Part of the film's success must be divvied out to director of photography Remi Adefarasin, who was also responsible for the lushness of Elizabeth. Each frame in Mirth is so luminous you can almost hear John Singer-Sargent begging for a chance to paint it. Adefarasin and his team have made modern day Glasgow—where the film was shot—almost tangibly feel like what we'd imagine Gilded Age New York to be. The beauty of these compositions actually adds friction to the story itself. In a serene, well-ordered world such as this, how can such spiteful, conniving people exist?
At first, the idea of Gillian Anderson (of X-Files fame) playing a Gilded socialite is a strange one. Anderson seems thoroughly modern somehow, as if the very idea of slapping her in a corset and a gravity-defying hair-do is akin to putting a flying buttress on one of downtown's mirrored office towers. But Anderson proves that she actually can act and makes the role of Lily Bart fresh and complex.
Without Anderson's skill, Mirth would be virtually unwatchable. Bart could be easy to play as a victim of the whims of this society, a woman who has no responsibility for her own destiny and is simply cruelly used by those around her to further their own agendas. While there is some of that going on, Bart is equally culpable; her vanity, her ambitions and her failures ultimately lead to her doom. Anderson captures this dual nature of Bart's journey from femme fatale to pariah with aplomb—even though she and most of her co-stars affect a strange Brit-esque accent that may be more a product of where the movie was filmed than a conscious choice.
An equally strange selection was Dan Aykroyd as a wealthy, morally questionable admirer of Bart's. At odd moments, you expected him to slap on a pointy prosthetic and consume mass quantities. A similar sort of problem hovers around Anderson—any minute now, an alien might just pop out of her gut—but, unlike Aykroyd, she has the skill to make you forget her pop culture iconicness. The rest of the supporting cast—from Eric Stoltz as Bart's unsettled friend to Laura Linney as the manipulative adulteress to Anthony LaPaglia as the representative of the nouveau riche—fill out the film nicely.
Really, though, the picture belongs to director Davies, DP Adefarasin, and Anderson. This is their vehicle to investigate an underrated American novelist and one of the more intriguing periods of American history. At times, granted, Mirth gets a bit talky, as if no one dared cut even one of Wharton's words. But it's worth pushing through these slack moments, if only to see what disingenuous beauty lies in the next set-up.
March 1, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 9
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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