Film - Jonathan Romney warms to an unusual and uncompromising adaptation of a Wharton classic
The title of Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth comes from Ecclesiastes: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." British director Terence Davies has always been a regular in the house of mourning, and his version of Wharton's novel is no exception - even if its cast does include Saturday Night Live joker Dan Aykroyd. The female lead, even more bizarrely, is X Files heroine Gillian Anderson, but none of this should be taken as evidence that Davies, director of such notoriously sombre autobiographical pieces as Distant Voices, Still Lives, has gone Hollywood. The House of Mirth may be a story of glamour and luxurious surfaces, but the film's costume-drama sheen covers a ruthless tragic machinery.
Davies never uses the period setting as glamorous distraction. Where Martin Scorsese's unabashedly romantic version of Wharton's The Age of Innocence fairly swooned at its own opulence, The House of Mirth is at once sumptuous and stark. Davies is fascinated with the elegance of Wharton's world, but honours the way in which appearance in her novels is always tied up with interpretation and moral appraisal. Davies adopts a starkly analytical tone from the outset. There are no surging crowd scenes or establishing shots to reassure us - just a concentration on people, the looks and gestures they exchange, the words they use. This is costume drama where language counts as much as clothes and furniture - and where clothes and furniture are themselves a language.
The House of Mirth is subtle tragedy, and only at the very end does Davies allow a note of poised melodrama. Lily Bart is a glamorous young society woman of whom dazzling things are expected. Laden as she is with gambling debts, her only hope is to fulfil those expectations and land a wealthy husband. But moral integrity fatally prevents her from taking part in the deceitful games that everyone else plays.
We already know from Gillian Anderson's TV alien-hunter what a cool customer she can be; this coolness proves remarkably suited to a 1900s flirt, ironist and socialite with a painful sense of her own shortcomings. Davies may initially have cast Anderson because her fleshy, haughty looks recall the society portraits of John Singer Sergeant. Yet, there is a sense in which Anderson and Lily are alike - each a star in her own firmament, each implying that she can be more than expectations allow for. Anderson - a little theatrically at times, but with a rich sense of emotional shading - pushes to become a complex, troubled character rather than the perfectly packaged image that Lily first appears to be. By the end of the film, as Lily's social stardom fades, Anderson touches the moral dimension she's after.
With Anderson at the fore, Davies does not need to fill his world with superficial glamour. Around her, he pares things to the essential. A key confrontation on a yacht takes place in front of a discreet tarpaulin, with no shimmering sea to distract us. Davies brilliantly casts against type to suggest the "dinginess" at the heart of Wharton's world. We expect Dan Aykroyd to be a jovial, slightly stuffy clown, but here, his brutish Gus Trenor is a predatory horror; urbane toughie Anthony LaPaglia turns up transformed into a squat, cunning moneyman. The most unexpected discovery, somewhat stealing the show from Anderson, is Laura Linney, hitherto an action-movie bystander, as Bertha, Lily's conniving nemesis, all feline knowingness and smart, appraising cruelty. In a film that bristles with small gestures, one of the most telling is Linney's way of taking Eric Stoltz's arm, gently, but with absolute proprietorial authority.
Davies can sketch bigger gestures, too - luxuriantly emotive moments, such as Lily and her beloved Lawrence Selden (Stoltz) kissing beneath Chinese lanterns to the swooning of a Borodin string quartet. But such moments are always located in a world of conventions and signs - "a world", as Wharton says, "in which conspicuousness passed for distinction". Davies shows us that conspicuousness, but never lets us uncritically fall for it. He inclines to austerity, rather, and refuses the concessions that usually make period fiction easier for modern viewers. He gives words their due, and from the start obliges us to sit up, listen and interpret. Both the plot's subtleties and some of the dialogue can be hard to unpick on a first viewing. However, this is less bad judgement on Davies's part than plain integrity. Why should we not work harder, for a change?
Davies may not exactly have revolutionised literary costume drama. (Can it be revolutionised, for that matter?) What he has done is infuse a tired genre with sharp intelligence and seriousness.
For anyone addicted to the flounces and fine carpets of traditional "quality" screen-lit, The House of Mirth may seem a little rigorous, severe - a touch staid, even. But you have to look and listen, and the emotional payoff is all the more powerful for the director's restraint. His great achievement is that The House of Mirth is a fine Wharton adaptation, but also real cinema - and real Terence Davies cinema, which is something else again.
The House of Mirth (PG) opens at the Curzon Mayfair, Screen on the Hill, Barbican and Chelsea Cinema, London, on 13 October
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