Terence Davies (2000)
Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The Neon Bible: with all three under my belt during BFI’s current season of his work, I felt I’d done my duty by Terence Davies. And you need to draw the line somewhere – in my case, at a Davies film starring Gillian Anderson. I changed my mind after realising I’d now seen every Davies feature except The House of Mirth. I also kept remembering what he said retrospectively about The Neon Bible: according to IMDb, Davies told Time Out that the latter film ‘doesn’t work, and that’s entirely my fault. The only thing I can say is that it’s a transition work. And I couldn’t have done The House of Mirth without it’. His adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel is widely considered one of his finest pieces of work. All in all, it made sense to get one more Terence Davies ticket.
The House of Mirth tells the unhappy story of Lily Bart, a member of high society in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City. Well-born but increasingly impecunious, Lily, through a combination of poor judgment and the censure of a callous social order, descends into emotional and physical isolation. She ends her life, in both senses of the phrase, in a shabby rented room. This screen adaptation has some strengths. There’s a congruence between Davies’ trademark claustrophobic filmmaking and the suffocating social and moral codes of the society he describes. The women’s costumes, by Monica Howe, gradually become a rustling armour. As Lily Bart, Gillian Anderson does give one of her more likeable performances. The House of Mirth came early in her career. Perhaps it was eagerness to go beyond The X-Files, in which she broke through to the big time, that animates Anderson’s presence here. (Just as well that something did: Davies, according to Wikipedia, cast her simply because he thought she resembled women in John Singer Sargent paintings!) In the closing stages, her Lily is even occasionally poignant, though it has taken plenty of vocal, facial and gestural repetition to get Anderson there.
As a director of actors, Davies tends to make things tiresomely obvious. In the milieu of the Wharton novel, what characters say may well conceal what they mean or are feeling. On the screen, though, the actors’ faces repeatedly telegraph the subtext. (The choice of accompanying classical music – excerpts from Così fan tutte, etc – is another kind of double-underlining.) On the death of her wealthy aunt (Eleanor Bron), Lily is shocked to inherit only a small portion of the aunt’s estate and reduced to working as a secretary to social climbing Mrs Hatch (Lorelei King). Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz) is Lily’s former suitor, a lawyer not rich enough for her to see him, at that time, as husband material; Selden now warns that her social standing will be further damaged by such undignified employment. Lily, who badly needs money, is angered by his remarks. The dispute between them is conducted at much too high a volume, given the proximity of other people in the frame. Considering how precisely weighted the line delivery supposedly is, it’s startling, too, how often members of Davies’ cast stress the wrong word.
Davies did well to cast Laura Linney, whose emotional suppleness lifts her portrait of Bertha Dorset, a married woman who’s had an adulterous affair with Selden, well above the level of most of the other supporting performances. (Linney appeared at around the same time as The House of Mirth in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, for which she received her first Oscar nomination.) There’s good work, too, from Anthony LaPaglia as the nouveau riche financier whose Jewish background makes him doubly unacceptable to old money; and from Mary MacLeod, in a cameo as Selden’s cleaning woman, who discovers and confronts Lily with a cache of love letters between Selden and – as Lily realises, though the cleaner doesn’t – Bertha Dorset. MacLeod makes an impact without making a meal of her small part, more than can be said for the likes of Eleanor Bron, Lorelei King and Linda Marlowe, as the milliner for whom Lily briefly works post-Mrs Hatch. The main cast also includes Dan Aykroyd, Penny Downie, Terry Kinney and Jodhi May.
Davies has often been described as ‘a poet of cinema’, a label that seems to assume that poetry has a standard emotional range and tempo – elegiac, highly stylised, slowly contemplative. As if. Dylan Thomas’ ‘Deaths and Entrances’, Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, Philip Larkin’s ‘Dockery and Son’: just three examples of sombre poems that, whether read on the page or heard out loud, are vividly compelling, without detriment to the force of their grim meaning. In fact, the poems’ momentum and rhythmical variety sharpen that meaning. In contrast, ars poetica Terence Davies-style lays on the melancholy thick. His films are usually high on long, unhurried camera movements, low on changes of pace and on humour.
Edith Wharton’s title, inspired by Ecclesiastes 7:4 (‘The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning. But the heart of fools is in the house of mirth’), is, of course, ironic. In the context of the Davies oeuvre, the title takes on a larger ironic import. Davies was very unhappy for most of his life, as he made clear in the 2022 Sight and Sound interview that modified my dislike of his work (see The Terence Davies Trilogy). From the age of seven, when his loathed, feared father died, he did reside in a place of joy and laughter, but the short-term tenancy didn’t extend beyond his eleventh birthday, when Davies began to lose his religious faith and to realise his equally troublesome sexuality. Although this makes one sad for him, it doesn’t make his films easier to enjoy or admire. Now that I’ve seen the lot, I feel relief, more than a feeling of mission accomplished. I’ll end my last review of this poet of cinema with a bit of poetry: ‘ ‘‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.” ’
27 November 2025
