The House of Mirth (2000)

After reading Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, it seemed like a good idea to revisit Terence Davies' film adaptation from 2000. I saw it when it first came out, and when I started watching it again I got bored and put it on pause and returned to it a few hours later. Maybe I was more attentive or maybe the story just got better, but I was enthralled by the second half.

Faithful to the book, Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) is an unmarried woman on the hunt for a husband in the gilded age of New York. The film leaves out the details that her father went broke; all we know is that she lives with her wealthy aunt and has a small allowance and some investments. Whether she realizes it or not, she is in love with lawyer Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz), and visits his rooms when she is between trains to the country. This small act seems to set her on a downward spiral.

The film glows for two reasons: Davies' excellent screenplay, which knows what to cut and what to leave, including verbatim patches of Wharton's dialogue: I loved the reading that Dan Aykroyd, as the lusty older man Gus Trenor, gave the line, "When a man pays for dinner, he expects to get a seat at the table," and Anderson's luminous performance. Her career has been spotty to nonexistent since The X-Files. Perhaps she has eclectic interests, for she never went the multiplex route, minus the two X-Files films. I would have loved to see her in more films over the years.

Davies manages to capture Anderson as a woman who is out of time. Looking back, we can say that she is a modern woman stuck in the wrong time period, but of course Wharton was writing at the very time she depicts, so she had no idea there would be such thing as a modern woman. But to watch Anderson's downward spiral, and her at times pathetic attempts to right herself, are heartbreaking as they are maddening, for at no time is Lily not in control of her own fate. She makes a series of bad decisions.

What a time it was for women of means in those days. Rich, but dependent on making the right kind of marriage to survive. One scene from the book that is cut that I would have liked to see is when Lily visits the poor woman, who imagines her guest's life as one of fantasy and nonstop pleasure. What The House of Mirth does is show how one can live in the shadow of the rich while being completely miserable.