X-Cellent, Ms Anderson...
by Kevin Bourke

"The biggest challenge for me was keeping a character I've played for seven years out of the movie"

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
Starring Gillian Anderson, Dan Aykroyd, Eric Stoltz. Directed by Terence Davies, Certificate: PG. Cornerhouse

On the face of it, adapting Edith Wharton's novel about the tragic fall from grace of a socialite in New York at the turn of the century might seem an odd choice for Liverpool-born director Terence Davies, who has hitherto concentrated almost exclusively on gorgeous, but non-linear, autobiographical material in films like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. But the fastidious Davies is quite clear about what drew him to Wharton's book.

"We live in a world of surfaces and Edith Wharton's world is no different," he contends. "The glittering facade of New York society at the turn of the century only thinly veils a compassionless world of savage humour and cruelty."

Lily (Bart, played in the film by X-Files star Gillian Anderson) is an unsuspecting and almost Hitch-cockian heroine, so caught up in a society of hypocrisy and concealment that she does not see the danger she is in until it is too late. "The story is contemporary, a savage satire. It's about what you look like, how much money you have and venality - what could be truer of modern day society? At the end of the last century it just looked different. Nothing has changed. That is why it is such a powerful story."

Anderson herself wanted to appear in the film for the opportunity of working with Davies, probably one of the most idiosyncratic and uniquely gifted British directors working today. "From the moment I read for him," she says, "It was very clear that in writing the screenplay, he had obviously spent a great deal of time and energy. I could tell that the lines were in his mind - and they were in his body in the way that he felt that they needed to be in order to pay homage to this magical writing. It was his passion to see it happen in this way and it was an extraordinary experience in the ways that we, in reading the screenplay, had the same vision of it. Clearly, it was very different from anything on which I had ever worked.

"What was really difficult," she continues, "was the brilliance of Edith Wharton's novel and especially from Lily Bart's perspective, the idea that its all in her mind. Every perception that she has about the world around her and peoples' personalities and the etiquette everything is filtered through her mind and not necessarily the dialog. So it was Terence's task, in a sense, to some how, without the luxury of those words, embody that feel and essence within the screenplay.

"I think that he obviously did that. Also I think he did that visually as well, that the poetry that was unable to be said in words was done visually with camerawork.

"This felt like my first 'real' film and the biggest challenge for me was keeping a character I've played none stop for the last seven years out of the movie. I mean, you know, one laugh and it feels like I'm laughing like Scully. I cry, it feels I'm crying like Scully. So it was challenging to not be too paranoid or self-deprecating."

She needn't have been. Anderson's performance is a marvellous one, and an invaluable contribution to a film that's quite brilliant in some ways, but certainly won't be to everyone's taste - Davies' pacing is positively funereal in some places, appropriately so but not exactly what today's multiplex audience expects. 

Also unexpectedly excellent are Dan Aykroyd as the loathsomely smug Gus Trenor, whose duplicity directly contributes to Lily's demise, and Eric Stoltz as the real love of Lily's life, but one she feels unable to acknowledge because of the way she sees her place in the world.

If you are willing to devote the same of sort of patience and intelligence to watching The House of Mirth that has clearly been lavished on its making, then there great rewards to be had.

Source: GO, Typed by Me, and all typed transcripts are my exclusive property