The Rich Really Are
Different From You And I-The Film Adaptation Of Edith Wharton’s “The House Of
Mirth” (2000)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
The House Of Mirth,
starring Gillian Anderson, Terry Kinney, based on the bool of the same name by
Edith Wharton, 2000
Greg Green the new site
manager has encouraged us in reviews and other assignments for this blog to
tell a little about how we got the assignment. His idea is to give the reader
an idea about how the assignment process goes and why. Others have written more
extensively than I will do here about how they got their assignments but it
basically boils down to two points. First, as a new writer here (although I had
been around the hard copy of this publication when fellow writer Josh Breslin
and I were companions before I moved on to a by-line in Modern Women Today), I had expressed an interest in dawn of the 20th
century period pieces and had as my first review the film adaptation of Oscar
Wilde’s The Ideal Husband which dealt
with late Victorian mores and morals around the marriage agreement in English high
society. The second merely that I had read the book version of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Greg insisted that I
do the film adaptation review after he had expressed satisfaction with the Wilde
review.
Of course Edith Wharton through her own high
society birth and its inherently informative connections was well-placed to do
writing on the later robber baron period in America after the ruthless original
industrial magnate founders got “civilized.” So high society and it foibles as
demonstrated here was like catnip for her. The interesting aspect though is not
the main character Lily Bart’s error of judgement that would eventually lay her
low but how tenuous the situation was for young women, maybe all women, without
direct access to serious money in an age when men for the most part controlled
the purse strings and the property deeds. One would have thought that the rich
and famous despite her foibles would have provided a safety net for one of
their own. Not so in Lily’s case, not so at all.
Once that aspect of
Lily’s life, of the way the episodes were portrayed in the film, is understood
then a lot of the mistakes she made along the way beyond her own somewhat
frivolous innocence makes a certain amount of sense. Dependent on what a rich
aunt would leave her in some future she had to avoid marrying some poor guy
like Seldon whom she loves and was something of a soulmate despite his stiff manner,
and he loves her despite her predilection for a man with serious money to ease
her way but cannot think to marry. That tension will drive both their
relationship and that series of errors and missteps which will lead her down
the class ladder and to an early grave via her hubris and dope dependency, that
landudum which will ease her deep depression and isolation once she cannot
depend on high society to cover up her mistakes. Bastards. On the way though we
glimpse at the hypocrisy of that old established monied class when one of their
own, only if marginally one of their own, doesn’t know how to play by the rules
of the game. And a guy like Seldon finds out too late that he could have saved
his Lily.
Aside from the dramatic
interludes and a pretty faithful adherence to the Wharton storyline the
costumes, the scenery and Gillian Anderson’s Lily are beautifully done. I hope
though on the basis of two film reviews that I don’t get tagged doing these
“women” films. Or super-hero ones either that Greg Green has threatened us allto
do to “broaden our horizons.”
