The House of Mirth (2000, Terence Davies) (Patreon)

86/100

Spoilers, I guess.

Third viewing, last seen early 2001. This film was essentially my introduction to Gillian Anderson—hadn't yet seen a single X-Files episode, and I have little memory of The Mighty, in which she apparently plays a supporting role—so only now do I fully appreciate just how deliberately, magnificently affected her Lily Bart is, especially early on (when Lily’s still in a position to be insouciant and combative). Hard to describe exactly what's odd about the way she speaks and carries herself, though I'm reminded of a remark Sondheim had someone make of Georges Seurat: "His touch is too deliberate, somehow." She's intensely deliberate, creating the impression that Lily's entire existence constitutes a theatrical role, which she strives to keep sufficiently diverting lest her benefactors (i.e., society) lose interest. At the time, I argued (in a chat group) that The House of Mirth fits snugly in the Merchant/Ivory tradition—a comparison not even remotely intended as derogatory, please note; I'm a big fan—but that seems nuts to me now. Anderson makes the film instantly disconcerting—the opening scene with Stoltz is downright electrifying by costume-drama standards, generating more sparks than most classic-lit adaptations manage in their first hour—and while Davies rarely goes grandiose à la Neon Bible or Long Day Closes, his penchant for quickly dissolving from one scene to the next, rarely employing a hard cut for that purpose, makes visceral the sense that nothing ever gets resolved, that Lily just aimlessly drifts into penury.

Or relative penury, at any rate. There's always a disconnect for me when Selden hisses "Do you know where you are?" at Lily, who's standing in what appears to be her new employer's mansion. (I guess he's repulsed by the new-money aspect? Either that or I just don't recognize Turn Of The Century Vulgar.) Likewise when an aghast Rosewood insists "You can't go on living here" of a rented room approximately 400x more luxurious than every NYC apartment I ever inhabited. Searching the aforementioned chat group for anything I might have written 20 years ago (after discovering that I never reviewed House of Mirth—didn't start doing TIFF drive-bys until the following year, and it got snapped up upon release by my Time Out New York colleague, after I first chose State and Main), I found one person* who disliked the film on essentially Marxist grounds:

I'd much rather see/admire a movie like My Name Is Joe (a fantastic exploration of what it's truly like to not have a job) than something like House of Mirth. To pretend/portray that the travails of an "unemployed" rich woman are no different, indeed even more worthy of sympathy, than the difficulties of the faceless downtrodden (who are conveniently never shown in Davies's film) is offensive, as far as I'm concerned.

This argument got plenty of pushback, from myself and others. But there's an element of truth to it, which gets to the heart of my increasingly unfashionable notion of what great drama should be. Making the downtrodden complex is by no means impossible—I really like My Name Is Joe, for the record—but it's a challenge, because the downtrodden, by definition, are victims of others' cruelty and/or indifference. Whereas what makes Lily Bart such a compellingly poignant figure to me is precisely the degree to which her misfortune is in part self-inflicted. Wharton (and by extension Davies) absolutely indicts the avaricious, quasi-solipsistic world that renders women like Lily helpless (even "useless," as she laments in a scene almost too raw to endure), and it's abundantly clear that her immersion in that world from birth blinds her to other potential options (notably Selden) that might offer her a modest sort of happiness. Still, we watch her make conspicuous errors of judgment throughout, even as some of those errors inspire admiration. ("You are mistaken in both the facts and what you infer from them" is truly A+ indignation.) And I stubbornly maintain that only the theoretically avoidable can be genuinely tragic.

Anyway, this movie wrecks me in a way that The Age of Innocence simply never has (with apologies to at least two of my friends who consider that one of the greatest films ever made). Loved it with very minor reservations then (I anticipated a rating around 79 or so), but this time the final note of Marcello's Oboe Concerto in D Minor (which I'd thought was Bach, but nope; apparently there's a variant that involves Bach, but the piece's provenance is way too complicated for me to grasp), accompanied by "New York 1907," had me sobbing all the way through the closing credits. Can't recall offhand another instance of place/time text being employed with such non-expository sadism—it's not even as if we're unaware of how little time has passed, since "1907" is visible on the check Lily receives just before she dies. The emotional crescendo derives from the tableau (upon which Davies holds for long enough to make you assume nothing more is coming) + the music + the rhetorical device. That's artistry. C’est le cinéma.

* Note to CM members: Not you, and not even anyone you'd likely remember.