The House of Mirth film review

certificate_PG

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

Terence Davies' remarkable movie probably contains more than enough reasons to inspire a number of detractors: it is sometimes funereally long, occasionally self-indulgent, has characters that are little more than two dimensional, lacks tension and for a great deal of it nothing really happens. However, once the viewer is adjusted to the pace of the film, there is a truth to be learnt about the shallowness and futility of the human condition that the author of the original work on which it is based, Edith Wharton, would have been justly proud. The success of this film is largely thanks to the director's refusal to compromise his intentions and the wonderful performance by its leading actress, who surely deserves a wide audience and, dare it be suggested, several statuettes for her troubles.

And what troubles they are. Anderson so convincingly portrays a 1900's woman about to lose any vestige of social dignity that one wonders if she somehow went back in time to do some form of early method acting. She portrays Lily Bart, an upper middle class patron of New York's turn of the century chattering classes. Without any direct family she has to rely on her elderly aunt for funds. Her biggest crime, however, is to be single woman: in the eyes of her prissy social companions, a single lady of a certain age is a positive liability.

Lily's attempts to remedy this situation, by trying to marry a man who can provide for her, are the beginnings of her downfall. When she visits one potential suitor, Eric Stoltz, she has to withstand scandalous gossip about being seen in a single man's apartment. The other men she encounters are either barefaced hypocrites or only after one thing. Increasingly, Lily's fondness for gambling becomes stronger and her aunt's point blank refusal to pay any of her debts places her on the brink of a social and personal abyss.

The descent, which sees Lily ending up as a pieceworker in a clothes factory and dabbling with drug abuse, is a tour de force in screen acting from Anderson. She conveys brilliantly the paradox of her character: one who realises the world she inhabits lacks depth but one who has little choice but to try and be part of it. Her fellow actors proficiently display the facile natures of the socially elite, but at the centre of it all is the fragile, luminous and desperate Lily.