Customer Reviews

The House of Mirth (Widescreen)

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

When we talk about great novels that deal with the downfall of a young woman, Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth" does not get mentioned in the same breath with "Madame Bovary," "The Awakening," and "Anna Karenina." Certainly there are substantial differences since Wharton's heroine Lily Bart is not a married woman seeking comfort in an adulterous affair; she is a single woman searching for a husband, playing the game of flirtation, and weighing her options. But in the end her destruction makes her a kindred spirit to Emma Bovary and the others. In fact, because her sins are relatively small and her destruction so complete, Lily Bart is a much more memorable tragic figure.

I came to this film version of "The House of Mirth" with no expectations other than a breakthrough performance by actress Gillian Anderson in the role of Lily. As it dawned upon me that we were watching the complete and total destruction of a human being by the venal society of which she thought she was a permanent member, Anderson's performance took on a truly haunting aspect. The result is as restrained an emotional performance as you have ever seen, reflecting the slower tempo of the times depicted (watch the measured pace of Lily's walk, both in the opening sequence at the train station and when the gilded society walks up the massive staircase to the opera).

Like Lily, we have our expectations of the characters in this gilded society shattered as the story progresses and she begins her descent into hell. The man who comes to her financial assistance, Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd), is looking for something in return; the man who would take her as a trophy wife in a loveless marriage, Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia), is ultimately the only person who will treat her decently; the man she truly loves, Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz) is unworthy of her affections; and the man who would treat her the way she truly deserves, George Dorset (Terry Kinney), is married to the instrument of her destruction and therefore beyond her reach. The ultimate irony is that Lily's character has a strength greater than those around her, but it does her no good in the end, when even her personal dignity is not enough to sustain her.

The measured performances throughout this film are superb, but it is Laura Linney as Bertha Dorset who stands out with her ability to inject pure venom into a quick glance or a few well chosen words. Anderson was not exactly robbed of an Oscar nomination for her performance, but if she had received one no one would have blinked an eye. Certainly this role will open up some serious doors for her down the road as she enters the rest of her career after Scully. "The House of Mirth" lacks the spectacle of "Age of Innocence," but I do not want to dock a film rating stars because of how much money they had to put things on the screen. This film starts slowly but then builds up a compelling momentum.

Terence Davies audio commentary is extremely insightful (I especially like his comment on how American actors use their eyes), although he picks his moments, usually at the beginning of scenes. His emphasis is on both the adaptation of Wharton's novel and the actual production of the film. With regard to the former he talks about the decision to combine characters or other alterations, and takes great pleasure in identifying those lines which are his own creation rather than Wharton's. The latter topic evidences how the director solved the problems of an $8 million budget filming in and around Glascow. Davies talks less than half the time during the audio commentary, but what is there is certainly first-rate. He also provides a spirited defense of the deleted scenes, most of which are longer versions of those in the film and which provide additional layers of density to the complex character relationships. Clearly, Davies was a writer-director passionately involved in the creation of his film.

It doesn't seem to matter how good a story is, and The house of Mirth is good, casting the right players makes the difference between great and dismal. Dan Akroyd seems to be reading his lines off a nearby wall. Gillian Anderson is beautiful but doesn't elicit sympathy for her role as 'heroine led astray'. Eric Stoltz is a fantastic actor but even he seems to struggle. The movie has sumptuous wardrobe and settings done with meticulous detail. Even so,it's hard to watch without wincing at Akroyd's embarrassing performance or hoping that the heroine falls in the mud.

erence Davies, the writer/director of this eye-catching but uneven adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel, is to be commended for presenting this work in such a visually beautiful way. In scene after scene, we are shown what looks like a series of John Singer Sargent paintings come to life. The play of soft light and deep shadow over Edwardian-era fashions is a pleasure to behold. Aurally, too, there is enjoyment to be had from the choice of classical composers (from Mozart to Borodin) to underscore several of the scenes. It's too bad that the same high standards of quality are not to be found in every element of this film, which dates from 2000.

The dialogue is sometimes witty and biting, but frequently sounds stilted, perhaps too often lifted from the pages of the 1905 novel, where Wharton's conversational exchanges are rather easier to accept on the page than they would be spoken aloud. There's a way to make "period pieces" sound natural in film (several of the Jane Austen adaptations have succeeded in this respect), but it requires a more skillful adapter than Davies appears to be, judging by this film.

As a writer he chose to eliminate certain plot points and even several characters (where is Gertie Farish, for instance, a major figure in the novel?) no doubt in order to make a film of a commercially acceptable length. True, the novel has over 50 characters of varying importance and runs to several hundred pages, but in the process of "telescoping" the story, a certain confusion is inevitable for viewers who are not familiar with the novel itself. As Davies explains, off camera, in one of the "bonus" features on the DVD, he was persuaded to eliminate certain scenes in the film which introduced and developed some of the characters, and/or deepened the viewers' understanding of their motivations and importance to the story. As a result, those who have not read the novel will likely be perplexed by the sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance of certain figures who sometimes play an important part in the evolution of the plot.

An impeccable cast could have made up for the deficiencies in the writing. Unfortunately, the quality of the acting varies considerably. The key role of the heroine, Lily Bart, is played by Gillian Anderson, who has the ravishing beauty and the sensitive facial features required for this complex character, a brilliant but perverse beauty who sabotages her own chances for worldly success. But there's a certain "studied" quality about Anderson's line readings that makes it all too obvious that we are watching an actress at work; we can seldom forget that fact and imagine we are watching Lily Bart herself. Eric Stoltz plays the part of Lily's friend and her moral "conscience," Lawrence Seldon, and he is rarely more than an appealing physical presence, one who registers as too immature for the role. There's none of the implied depth and emotional ambivalence that Wharton endowed this character with in her book. Of the other actors, the most effective are Laura Linney as a duplicitous socialite who precipitates Lily's social downfall, and Eleanor Bron (whom I recall from the Beatle's film Help!, in 1965) as Lily's imperious and puritanical aunt. They set the standard for what the casting quality might have been, but was not. And how I wish that whoever hired Dan Ackroyd and Anthony Lapaglia (was it Davies?) to play their respective roles had thought better of it before the film went into production. At least, however, those two performances were in some way memorable, though misguided. Many of the other actors' contributions produced instant amnesia soon after the closing credits. They weren't so much bad as they were simply bland.

All in all, this a film with certain virtues and a good many defects. Whether it will appeal to many people in years to come is very much an open question. I hope that, at the very least, it motivates people to read or reread Wharton's novel, which is an enduring classic. (See my amazon.com review "From Timely to Timeless.")
Comment

Couldn't help but feel the pain that the heroine went through. Wonderful film. I was surprised by Gillian Anderson's suberb acting because I had only seen her in the television show "X-Files". I would recommend this film to anyone who is patient to watch this film and who has an appreciating for tragic stories.

I always hesitate to compare a movie adaptation of a book to the original book itself, because they are 2 different forms and no filmmaker is obligated to be true to the book on which his/her film is based. However, having read Edith Wharton's book and watched this movie immediately after, it is hard not to talk about whether the filmmaker's vision is at all consistent with the novelist's.

The main strength of this film is that it creates a wonderful atmosphere, contrasting leisurely scenes of country life and European cruising with the stuffy, constricting atmosphere of large cities and their attendant social life. It is not difficult to see how Lily Bart (played by Gillian Anderson) can become such a tragic victim of the heartless social machine. Scenery and cinematography are great -- though I think a long scene showing the rain on a country estate turning into the sparkly Mediterranean sea could have been shortened in order to devote more time to characterization.

Casting is, for me, a weakness across the board. Although Gillian Anderson is intense and passionate, she seems too "heavy" and ponderous to portray the (at least at first) light, radiant Lily. (As I watched I continually thought of Romola Garai's portrayal of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda -- Garai seems perfectly Lily-like with her tall, agile figure and head-turning beauty.) Eric Stoltz is far too bland and boyish as Selden; in the novel, Selden is reserved and hides his emotions, while Stoltz seems to portray him as not HAVING any deep emotions. (Imagine what Daniel Day-Lewis would have done with this role!) Dan Aykroyd is weak as Trenor; there's nothing threatening about him. Most of the time he acts like a jolly big brother to Lily, so his sudden turnaround is unconvincing -- and his scornful "get out" when they quarrel just doesn't fit the fact that he is truly in thrall to Lily (or willing to be if she does what he asks). And the actor who plays George Dorset is wooden and awkward; he doesn't seem tortured or desperate, but just states his lines with a lips-pursed expression that pales before Anderson's intensity. The two strongest portrayals here are Laura Linney as Bertha Dorset (seemingly sweet, yet able to cut another person with just a word or a look) and Elizabeth McGovern as Carry Fisher (as Downton Abbey attests, McGovern is a wonderful period actress who can be sweet, languid, and intense in quick succession). In general I also found that the movie slips over the large cast of characters, mentioning important characters like "the Gormers" but never showing them, or shortchanging them (for instance, Judy Trenor appears only twice, so her importance is diminished).

But the worst writing/casting error in the film is the decision to combine the characters of Gerty and Grace into one character, Grace Stepney. They are such markedly different women that to conflate them seems bizarre. In the novel, Lily's relationship to the faithful Gerty, who supports Lily despite her own love for Selden, is extremely important to the moral tone of the story. In the movie, when Grace discourages Lily by saying that Selden is just like other men so she had better not tell him the truth, there is a huge lost opportunity to strengthen the movie's moral backbone and to show the contrast between true love and all the sham forms of it that exist in Lily's various circles. The absence of the Gerty character also removes the novel's references to Lily helping the poor and therefore encountering one of the women she helped. This scene is crucial in the novel; without it, the world of the movie seems almost totally negative, with little warmth or brightness anywhere. I don't think that was Wharton's vision.

Overall I found this movie interesting, but I was disappointed in many of the decisions related to character and casting.

This film version of Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth" should be commended as a good attempt to bring the classic 1900's novel of manners to the big screen. However, while the director makes a laudable effort to adhere to the text, there are too many missing pieces to encompass the entirety of the tragedy that is Lily Bart. The removal of key sequences and themes - her parental influences, the irony of charity, her personal fear of filth and dinginess, Selden's role as a spectator and Lily's art, and the final scene with Netty's baby - leaves us with a separated, disjointed view of Lily. In short, the lack of setting and background means that if you have not read the book, you will not like this film. It leaves too much to the imagination.

While Gillian Anderson gives a good portrayal of Lily, the other actors hardly do their characters justice. Dan Aykroyd should stick to "Ghostbusters" or "My Girl" rather than attempting Gus Trenor; he simply doesn't fit this role. Elizabeth McGovern is blunt and leaves me cold, when her written character has far more heart than we are given in this interpretation. Eric Stoltz's portrayal of Selden is perhaps the most divergent from the character we know in the novel, but apart from a bad interpretation of the character the actor himself comes across as insincere - he is not Wharton's Lawrence Selden.

Overall, the film is good, but it lacks the emotion, the background, and the establishment of setting that would have made it great. Granted, the two hour time of the film would have been far longer if the things I have pointed out were to be included, but maybe someday the BBC or A&E will take on the project and do it the full justice it deserves. But until then, do yourself a favour and read the book - and leave this film on the shelf until you do.

The biggest flaw to this movie is the uneven performance put up by Anderson. She is great in the first half an hour, but her performance degenerates into pity (much like the character she plays) and unconvincing for the rest of the film. Aykroyd just looks and acts ridiculous as the married seducer, probably the worst cast role in the film. For some reason I never developed a full sympathy for Lily Bart. It could have been a great film, but the rather theatrical direction leave the film cold.

Fresh from reading and loving the book, I was really looking forward to seeing the film. What a shock to see how slow and lugubrious it was on celluloid.

Eric Stolz made a weak, effeminate male lead; more suitable would have been Linus Roache ("Wings of the Dove"). LaPaglia, whom I loved in "Betsy's Wedding" and more recently "Lantana," was miscast as the snubbed Jewish Rosedale, and Jodhi May, after such a moving performance in "A World Apart" when she was a girl, chose the trembling lip of melodrama. Combining Grace and Gertie did not work for me.

Even Dan Ackroyd was not floridly obnoxious enough as Gus. And Elizabeth McGovern was insipid as Carrie Fisher. The one bright spark was Laura Linney as Bertha. This film was a huge disappointment. Read the book; skip the movie.

this film is excellent, but this i attribute in most part, the edith wharton's creating such a brilliant story.
what is so interesting about authors such as this, is they inspire those like myself who only know the time of "now" that we live in, & this story opens up the times before, how we came to be where we are now, filling in jigsaw pieces & also what life on a bigger picture is/was about.
gillian anderson is wonderful as the tragic heroine, being free-spirited, independent & fun-loving.
the thing that got me with this story was how she met such a tragic demise when she did nothing wrong!
she was cruelly & jealously played by those she trusted called friends.
maybe this is truly a cautionery tale!

The acting in this beautifully shot movie was quite good, but unfortunately the script was terrible. Anderson, forced to roll out the majority of the ridiculously florid dialogue, occasionally struggled with it, but her emoting itself was good. Aykroyd and LaPaglia did a superb job acting and seemed to have no problems getting around the lines, but I must emphasize that the lines themselves were painful at times. Nobody speaks like that! And nobody ever did! The style fluctuated far too often between poetics and colloquialisms, many of the latter seeming entirely too modern for 1905.

Personally, even though I am a huge LaPaglia fan, I don't know if I could stomach this movie again, wonderful though he is. I'm glad I merely rented it.