The House of Mirth (2000) – DVD

**½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C
starring Gillian Anderson, Dan Aykroyd, Eleanor Bron, Terry Kinney
screenplay by Terence Davies, based on the novel by Edith Wharton
directed by Terence Davies

by Walter Chaw Terence Davies's adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, The House of Mirth is ultimately a languid and luxurious failure, though always a lavish and often a compelling one. Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz are vaguely miscast as the Titian leads, while an appearance by Dan Aykroyd in a distracting role as a lascivious cad nearly sinks the production with every moment of his Elwood Blues quick-talking shyster patter, yet Davies's ability to infuse each of his films with a charge of self-confessional mortification lends the piece an air of sad gravity and outrage. The almost unbearable claustrophobic weight of alienation that flavours his non-linear portfolio (Death and Transfiguration, Distant Voices Still Lives, The Long Day Closes) can be traced to Davies himself feeling

…like an outsider. Even though I'm the youngest of ten children and loved my mother, especially, and my sisters and brothers very much, I still felt as though I was looking in on something. And that was exacerbated by the fact that I then discovered in puberty that I am gay and hated it–I will go to my grave hating it. (Davies as quoted in FILM COMMENT, Jan/Feb 01, p. 55)

This feeling of self-loathing, the need for acceptance, and unavoidable dissociation is no doubt what first drew the British director to Wharton's tale of a young woman of intelligence and beauty in high society who, through small lies and the inconquerable urge to be accepted by an insular world, is the instrument of her own downfall. In a similar way, Davies's desire to belong to an idealized group is ultimately doomed by his own inability to come to terms with his sexual preference, although that struggle is taken on in each of his films.

The occupation Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) holds in the blue-blood upper crust of turn-of-the-century New York is marriage and status. A woman victimized by the conventions of her time and the caprices of her peers, Lily neither surrenders to her love for a lawyer, Selden (Eric Stoltz), that does not satisfy her own need for acceptance in her circle, nor lowers herself to employ the tactics of her circle to ensure her acceptance. She is, in other words, not strong enough to do what is right, and not courageous enough to do what is wrong–a passive observer to her own destruction.

Beyond a broad discussion of its loyalty to the themes favoured by Wharton and a speculative musing on the personal demons of director Davies, there are two oblique ways in which to attack The House of Mirth: from a rather obvious and pretentious Promethean approach, and from the Baroque and Rococo movements in visual art. Let's spend a moment with each.

A thing that is often forgotten about the Promethean myth (as told by Aeschylus) is that as the Titan suffered his martyrdom in the Caucausus, he did so at his own refusal to reveal a message to Zeus. Prometheus, then, is a martyr of his own hand. Lily Bart is likewise a martyr by her own hand in her refusal to reveal a clutch of letters that would, at any point in her social crucifixion, absolve her of guilt and restore her to good graces. The Prometheus myth is pertinent to a discussion of The House of Mirth, first because fire is used as a symbol of knowledge (certain women smoking cigarettes), and then through Christian reinterpretation as a symbol of illicit sexual knowledge.

Tracing the owners of cigarettes, of cigarettes between one to another, and of individuals asking for cigarettes, is revealing of the motivations and relationships of characters, and the amount of knowledge that any one character possesses at any one time.

Opening with a baroque concerto by Marcello and a title sequence that features growing coils and patterns that do resolve themselves, indeed, into something labyrinthine and baroque, The House of Mirth is an evolution from the Baroque school of visual art into the Rococo style, where the film finds its truest visual expression. From the Mannerist mode the Baroque acquired passion and activity, and from the Renaissance, a certain sturdiness and opulence, while the Rococo is indicated by a naturalism and light rhythm, a delicate non-functional superficiality that indicated the indolent aristocracy of that age. The trembling moment of transition between somewhat similar movements, the Baroque into the Rococo, is that liminal space where artist Antoine Watteau painted and where Davies places The House of Mirth.

The House of Mirth, then, not coincidentally resembles a painting by Watteau called Ceres ("Summer"), one of the four personified seasons Watteau painted for Pierre Crozat in 1715 and the only one of the quartet that survived. There is an overt reference to this painting at about the 38-minute mark of the film as the lovely Lily Bart inexplicably appears in a tableau vivant, dressed to resemble the goddess from the painting but notably missing its child and boar, with which Watteau presented the idea of fecundity fulfilled. (Click here for a look at Watteau's piece.) Many things can instantly be inferred from this one image in the film and its missing elements–an image that is, in fact, the Rosetta Stone for all of The House of Mirth. Though Lily may, like the goddess of fertility, be sexually desirous and inspiring of sexual desire in others, Davies is sure to point out that Lily is an ironic symbol of desire and fertility in that she is wholly incapable of positive action and doomed to perish alone and a virgin.

Beyond the obvious references to Lily's character in Davies's static tableau, however, is the visual style of the period that he has lifted for his The House of Mirth. The term "Rococo" is a combination of the French terms "rocaille," meaning "stones," and "coquille," meaning "shells." The two terms together suggest a style indicated by wispy brushstrokes, a light naturalism, and a Rubenesque palette of colours awash in decadent golds and leering reds. Dealing with the leisurely pastimes of the landed gentry, the Rococo school utilized light and a fascination with mirrors that blended its figures into its landscapes and created a rounded, dreamlike quality.

The House of Mirth is likewise obsessed with the illusory depths of mirrors and the suffusion of warm light that physically blurs the edges of the characters, melting every scene into a carefully-framed and meticulously blocked Rococo tableau vivant. Terence Davies has essentially (and brilliantly) manufactured a setting and a feel that is as forced and artificial, as vestigial and ridiculous, as 1905's New York blue-blood society. Part and parcel with the aggressively affected framing of a film to constrict into the square limitations of a painting, however, is not only an appropriate anxiety of a choking imprisonment, but also an unfortunate level of museum detachment.