Catharsis, said Aristotle, is the goal of drama. You\u27d never know it from The House of Mirth, an adaptation of Edit Wharton\u27s 1905 novel by the great British filmmaker Terence Davies. Its intensity is distilled in its uncompromising restraint, and though there are passing moments of anger in the film, and rare, sudden swellings of grief, there\u27s not a second of real release in this grim anatomy of a socialite\u27s inexorable decline. Yet the film\u27s relentlessness does not feel cruel. It feels like the piercing expression of a boundless pity

Morrison, James

English

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The House of MirthDirector/writer: Terence Davies, from the novel by EdithWharton. Producer: Olivia Stewart. Cinematographer: RemiAdefarasin. Sony Pictures Classics.Catharsis, said Aristotle, is the goal of drama. You’dnever know it from The House of Mirth, an adap-tation of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel by the greatBritish  lmmaker Terence Davies. Its intensity is dis-tilled in its uncompromising restraint, and though thereare passing moments of anger in the  lm, and rare, sud-den swellings of grief, there’s not a second of real re-lease in this grim anatomy of a socialite’s inexorabledecline. Yet the  lm’s relentlessness does not feel cruel.It feels like the piercing expression of a boundless pity.Lily Bart is a strong-minded heiress whose will toindependence can only be perceived as pride by thesociety she lives in—New York City at the turn of thetwentieth century. She recklessly accumulates  gam-bling debts, treats the powerful men who covet herwith lighthearted scorn, and falls victim, in the end, topetty rumors. Disinherited , she joins the workingclasses, and gradually descends into drug addiction.It’s the stuff of pulp melodrama, raised in Wharton’sdelicate ly histrionic treatment of the material  to thelevel of tragedy-of-manners. In turn, Davies resists thehistrionics and makes the story into a chamber-play,in which squelched emotion and strangled expressionperform a hushed duet. Davies seems to have set him-self the near-impossible task of making a movie aboutrepression whose power lies in the fact that what’s re-pressed never rises to the surface.The Masterpiece-Theatre-style costume dramasthe  lm super cially resembles tend to work in some-thing like the opposite way. They’re all about repres-sion, too, typically  with the self-congratulatoryimplication that we moderns have risen above the sti- ing but picturesque social rituals of days of yore. Butthey can usually only represent repression by revealingthe strong emotions it mitigates— as in the explosionsof violence in Howards End, say, or the sex scenes inWings of the Dove. Only then do you realize whatundercurrents are supposed to be surging beneath thesurface. But Davies wants to reveal these undercur-rents without ever manifesting them directly because,his film  suggests, social repression doesn’t justshort-circuit true expression temporarily before it  -nally comes out—it kills the feelings it smothers.There is a sex scene in The House of Mirth, andit’s a marvel in its suggestion of subdued carnality, ofa desire that can barely take shape amid the opulenttrappings designed to crush it. The scene evokes acompelling sense of suspended time, and hopelesslonging that gains force because it’s hopeless. Thepace is slowed, in long, languorous takes, and soundeffects are invested with a charge of rare sensuality:Film Quarterly, Vol. no. 55, Issue no. 1, pages 49-51. ISSN: 0015-1386. © 2001 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 49Anatomy of a decline: GusTrenor (Dan Aykroyd, left) and Sim Rosedale (AnthonyLaPaglia) hover over Lily Bart(Gillian Anderson).the whispering folds of elaborate clothing, the lappingof moist lips in halting speech, the keening echo of aconcerto so faint, so far distant, that it might be heardin memory alone. The scene is not meant to suggestthat if only these people could break out and get intouch with their real,  primal selves—à la the Mer-chant/Ivory Room with a View—then they’d triumphover the restriction of social mores. The whole pointis that’s just what they can’t do.Still, some viewers might understandably, at  rst,mistake The House of Mirth for another entry in theMerchant/Ivory stakes. It’s a period piece, after all,with fancy costumes, classical music  lling the sound-track, and painterly compositions—the last image fadesinto a melancholy tableau that suggests Mary Cassatt.I don’t mean to slight Merchant/Ivory unnecessarilyhere: with films like Shakespeare Wallah and Rose-land, we should recall,  they were international pio-neers of independent  lmmaking. Before they settledinto the cozy niche of their recent films, they evenbrought some of that independent spirit to their earli-est forays into costume drama—as in the dryly severeThe Europeans (1979), out of James, to which TheHouse of Mirth bears some affinities. But the rigorousspareness of Davies’s  lm has none of the genteel auraor the classy status of the later Merchant/Ivory pro-ductions. In The House of Mirth, scene follows scenewith an impacted cadence made harsher, somehow, bythe swift, precise dissolves that link the images, andthe tableaux have an enclosed, airless quality— youcan sense the dank, rare ed atmosphere, but you can’tbreathe in it.The whole film is slightly, delicately stylized, andGillian Anderson’s performance as Lily Bart suits thismilieu  perfectly. By no means is it standard, natural-istic “star” acting. It is both mannered and under-stated, a thoroughly modulated  performance, thegestures refined, the intonations of line readings justslightly, though fastidiously, stilted. This stylization ismeant to suggest a range of emotional colorings, whileretaining an essential elegance. Even after Lily hasresigned herself to her debasement, she remains ex-cruciatingly well-bred—as if she thought she were ina Merchant/Ivory film. Considering the extreme biastoward naturalistic acting of many film viewers, Anderson’s performance will not be to every taste, especially since it’s at odds with the more traditionalstyles of many of her fellow actors—Eric Stoltz,  for instance, who plays Lawrence Selden (Lily’s truelove). But this works for the film , too, in the end, suggesting Lily’s terrible distinction , her intractableapartness.If you’re a lover of Wharton who wants to view afull adaptation of her work, see Martin Scorsese’s TheAge of Innocence. That  lm encompasses the waspishwit, the detailed examination of social minutiae, andTrapped in the House of Mirth5051the exuberance giving way to melancholy that are thehallmarks of Wharton’s great novels. With sheer in-tensity of focus, Davies concentrates here only on thedourness, in all its varied textures. The emotional reg-ister of the  lm is closer to Strindberg than to Wharton.It’s a very modern rendering of Wharton’s fairly mod-ern novel, on the order of Jane Campion’s treatmentof James in The Portrait of a Lady. Davies skews someof the causes in Wharton’s plot: the nature and originsof the rumors swirling about Lily are obscured, andLily’s sojourns as secretary and milliner are startlingbecause relatively  unexplained in the  lm’s plot. Thisis because Davies wants to show this society as a com-plex closed system, where the causes of effects arenever easy to determine, even when they seem to benothing but petty personal motives.Davies is known—when he’s known at all—fordensely free-associative memory-films like DistantVoices/Still Lives (1987) and The Long Day Closes(1993). These  lms transport the materials of Britishsocial realism, chronicles of working-class family life,into a heady context of modernist aesthetic ism, withfragmented narratives and highly wrought alien-ation-effects. But though the  lms look avant-garde tomany viewers, it’s hard to stay too alienated fromthem—the feeling for the characters  is so deep. Watch-ing these movies is like seeing the ghosts of loved ones,substantial but  eeting, and understanding at last thesuffering that made them what they were. For Davies,we’re all products of our time, and one of the thingsthis means is that we’re trapped in time. In those ear-lier films, we watch as the charac ters, helpless andtrapped and beloved, strive variously for transcen-dence—pursuing the errant cycles by which they live,or joining together in fugitive song. In The House ofMirth, one still feels one is watching a cast made up ofphantoms, and the feeling expressed for them is stilldeep. But because the world of the  lm is so tragicallyloveless, this feeling can take shape, not as love, butonly as an abiding sympathy with those who must live,and die, there. And this time there is no transcen-dence—except, perhaps, for the one that might comelater, after the  lm is done, when you know you havewitnessed a work of art.An earlier version of this review appeared in The IndependentWeekly (Durham, N.C.).James Morrison teaches  lm and literature at Clare-mont McKenna College. He is the author of Passport toHollywood, a critical study, and Broken Fever, a memoir.

Film Review: The House of Mirth

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Film Review: The House of Mirth

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