As with The Gift last night, The House of Mirth is a movie that would not be worth mentioning -- it's more or less a standard period piece, though it retains the sharp witticisms of Edith Wharton's novel -- were it not for the extraordinary performance of its leading lady. But you expect superlative acting from Cate Blanchett; Gillian Anderson comes as a surprise. Aside from her pleasant but not exceptional appearance in Playing by Heart, my only exposure to Anderson has been through The X-Files, where I always thought her rather flat and monotone. Plus, physically, she's not at all how I'd always pictured Lily Bart.
But she does a fantastic job. Though she never quite lights up a room the way Lily should, Anderson hits everything else perfectly. Just by the way she carries herself and carefully turns her face to present it at the best angle, it's clear that she's aware every minute of how she looks to others. Anderson expresses beautifully Lily's ambivalence toward marriage: she's desperate to marry rich because it's the only way that she'll be able to live in the manner to which she was born, but she can't reconcile her fiduciary need with her romantic nature (not to mention the appalling selection of eligible wealthy bachelors) and sabotages herself every time she gets close to her goal. She gets to run the gamut of emotion here and, with the exception of one scene toward the end where she overdoes it, subtly shows the passionate, heartrending turmoil bubbling beneath the socially imperative façade of restraint and decorum -- without ever seeming as flat and bloodless as she seems in The X-Files.
The only other actor who stands out is Laura Linney, in a deliciously nasty little part as a viper in fashionable clothing. The rest of the cast is more or less unremarkable, and two of the most important characters are sadly miscast. As Gus Trenor, Dan Aykroyd isn't anywhere near as vulgar and overbearing as he should be; in only one scene does he truly convey the menace that should be shadowing him all the time. And Eric Stoltz is all wrong for Lawrence Selden, the man Lily loves but won't marry because he's not rich. Stoltz is too detached and smirky; he feels anachronistically ironic. In the book, he's an arch observer of the social scene, but he's also a member of it, and he follows its dictates as stringently as any of the other characters. Next to Anderson's sensual Lily, he's a cold fish. More importantly, in the book he comes to believe the terrible rumors being spread about Lily, and that is why he avoids her. In the movie, he's just gone for long periods and, to all appearances, always believes in her.
I'd started re-reading the book in anticipation of the movie's release, and I just finished it last night. So the parts of the book that are missing were more glaring for me than they would usually be. Most of what's left out is justifiably so, but a great deal of import is lost as well. You don't get a sense of the exquisitely nuanced strata of New York society, which is essential to properly tracing Lily's fall from grace; in the movie, if you had no background as to the position of the various characters, you would think her descent very abrupt. Two characters, one angelically good and the other petty and back-stabbing, are combined into one, giving her actions a very different tone and also robbing the story of the touchstone against whom Lily measures herself.
Director Terence Davies does an elegant job of posing Anderson as though in a painting, much as Lily intentionally poses herself, but he spends even more time than Wharton obsessing over objects. There's one exasperatingly long scene that coincides with the division in the book between Part I and Part II; Davies shows furniture in Lily's aunt's house covered in dust cloths after all the occupants have left for the season. A brief shot is all we need to establish that the house is unoccupied, but for several minutes, the camera glides over the furniture in various rooms, then outside the house slowly drifting over garden walls, all for the purpose of a not-especially-interesting dissolve from the water in the creek to the Mediterranean waters where Lily is sailing with friends. And the movie gorges obscenely on the tragic final tableau -- the thought running through my mind at the prolonged view of the final scene was: "emotional pornography."
I'd recommend the movie, with the caveats that you probably ought to be a fan of period pieces and that you really should read the book, before or after you see the film. But be aware that, if you miss it, you're missing one of the best performances of the year.
By the way, the title of the novel comes from Ecclesiastes 7:3-4:
"Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the
sadness
of the countenance the heart is made better.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning;
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth."
Take that, happy people!
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