House of Mirth

Devastating:  "What is truth?  With respect to a woman, it's a story that's easy to believe," so says Gillian Anderson as the doomed Lily Bart in Terence Davies' The House of Mirth (2001).  An adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel of the same name, Davies' film is sumptuously beautiful, disturbing, and profound:  the movie has the amplitude and scope of a Shakespearean tragedy.  Lily Bart is a beautiful young woman, spoiled and arrogant.  She lives under the protection of her wealthy Aunt, a censorious, strangely prudish and reclusive former socialite -- one suspects that the embittered woman's life has been battered by some kind of romantic catastrophe.  Lily Bart loves a sardonic and somewhat indolent lawyer, Mr. Selden, but socially they seem to be mismatched and the romance between them, which both resist and, even, deride, can't progress notwithstanding the erotic attraction between the couple.  (Selden and Lily have a couple of rapturous onscreen kisses that are so intense that it is arduous to watch them -- obviously, they have been intimate, but they are both too intelligent and too distrustful to pursue the relationship.)  Selden has also had an affair with one of Lily's married friends, the poisonous Bertha Dorset, and there are incriminating love letters that play a role in the story.  Lily is high-spirited and willful:  she's the kind of young woman who will attend an opera wearing a resplendent scarlet gown with two men to whom she is not married.  Although she is innocent of any actual wrongdoing, she is naïve and her conduct triggers a scandal and, then, a series of scandals that results in her being cast out of polite society and disinherited by her Aunt.  Lily's tragedy is classical in scope and meaning because it results from a defect in her personality that also defines her character, a flaw that is inextricable from her greatest virtue:  she is vain to the point of self-destructive pride:  but her vanity and pride also evince a kind of hopeless integrity.  The very impulse that causes her to defy society results in her calamity.  (On a more pragmatic level, she has gambled for money and finds herself with debts that she can't pay without subjecting herself to some species of high-society prostitution -- most of the men in the movie ask her to become their mistress at one point or another, a request that she denies because of her love for Selden and out of self-respect.  In some respects, Lily Bart resembles the heroine of Ophuls Earrings of Madame de-- undone because of relatively small domestic indebtedness -- although she is much more intelligent, active, and has a penetrating understanding of moral defects in the social milieu that she inhabits.)  Davies', a great director, has made an extraordinarily beautiful film:  the colors and costumes are derived from the high-society portraits of John Singer Sargent and the turn of the century locations (the movie takes place between 1904 and 1905) are spectacular -- palaces, formal gardens, Italian villas and New York mansions, and a yacht adrift in the gloriously turquoise blue of the Adriatic Sea (the first shot of the yacht is literally breathtaking).  Davies' direction is subtle and restrained:  he edits the film as a great, dignified larghetto and, in the center of the movie, there is a rapturous series of tracking shots moving from sheeted and veiled furniture in a huge marble mansion to a rainstorm in formal gardens and, then, encompassing sun on the water in Italy, a kind of visual aria scored to an actual aria from Cosi Fan Tutti that is every bit as splendid and beautiful as the famous tracking scenes in The Long Day Closes scored to Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy."  Gillian Anderson (she was Scully in Tv's X-Files) is fantastically effective as Lily Bart; her acting here is justly renowned as one of the great performances in film history -- at first, she seems sarcastic, narcissistic and rebarbative, but as the film progresses and her plight becomes more humiliating and hopeless the film achieves a kind of tragic grandeur.  Consider, for instance, her polite rejection of Sam Rosedale's offer of marriage, her measured and gracious response, her cautious and diplomatic words and gestures that are intended to reject the man but keep the door open -- for, after all, Lily recognizes that she is probably doomed to become a courtesan at some point.  But when the earnest and kind Rosedale leaves the room we see Lily's visceral revulsion -- a revulsion that is not directed so much at Sam, but, at herself, for being tempted by him.  (Lily's later scenes with Sam are even more powerful.)  "The world is vile" Lily says at one point -- an extreme statement but one whose validity, perhaps, the film demonstrates.  Consider the scene where the socialite Bertha Dorset has apparently betrayed her husband with an Italian suitor.  Lily stays up with the husband, who, in fact, loves her, waiting for the errant wife to return.  The next day, Bertha diverts attention from her own misdeeds by accusing Lily of adulterous intentions with respect to her husband and Lily is unceremoniously "cast off the yacht" -- this scandal, added to the others begins Lily's descent into poverty and disgrace.  The entire thing is exquisitely staged, brilliantly and mysteriously acted, an exhibition of savage cruelty that hides at the heart of this glittering world of wealth and privilege.  The film is two hours and twenty minutes long but it never seems repetitive and, in fact, the picture increases with power as it progresses to its shattering conclusion.  Davies is one of the world's greatest directors and, I think, future critics may regard this picture as his magnum opus -- it is deeply distressing that no one went to see this film and that it is almost unknown.  Make no mistake about it:  House of Mirth is a great masterpiece:  Seek it out!