Still, aided by oily red hair that matches Anderson's burnt-orange tendrils, he's never looked cleaner or seemed more valiant. Stoltz is a less dashing Lawrence Selden than the one we crave. The rest of the cast also seems only vaguely matched to Wharton's characters. The sight of her using it furtively to promote to us Lily's exasperation and increasing misery is transformative. Anderson looks nothing if not eternally sad, and her face comes with its own narrative. It's fairly obvious, though, why Davies has visions of Sargent when he sees her. To my mind, Anderson's a pre-cubist caricature of Greer Garson - her prettiness as mildly awkward as her manner of speaking. Anderson's not the fully blossomed beauty Wharton imagined. It's something altogether less funny onscreen.
In Lily Bart, "The House of Mirth" has a tragedian the size of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina - but Davies delivers her without the visual and emotional opera.ĭrawn to her resemblance to the women in John Singer Sargent paintings, Davies cast Anderson, who's best known for "The X-Files." On paper, that's a joke. It's sad to think that if she could have held on for 95 more years, she could have made the cut for "Sex and the City." Instead, she's ravaged by the tyranny of speculation and the fatality of gossip. Ensuing altercations, accompanied by Lily's own refusal to avenge herself when necessary, result in her eviction from Eden and set her on the road to ruin. People will talk about a 29-year-old single girl with a number of suitors but none that converts to a marriage partner. But as fate - or at least Wharton's bitter version of it - would have it, Lawrence Selden's (Eric Stoltz) wallet isn't to her liking, just his heart. The ones in this privileged utopia adore her she loves only one. So both because it's customary and because she has no fortune of her own, Lily has to find a man. Her lifestyle, which has been purchased mostly on credit, demands money in order to be maintained, and her debts need to be paid. Like the book, the movie tells the saga of Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson), a self-constructed woman on the prowl for a husband in New York's more rarefied social circles.
He's also more taken with the emotional amplitude in her book as opposed to the elaborate assassination of materialists implicit in her almost-love story. Naturally, he's more expedient than Wharton. Davies ("Distant Voices, Still Lives," "The Neon Bible"), here at his least florid and most unaffected, fashions an adaptation with an equal measure of damnation. It was, at its most forceful, parodic and vividly damning, an American tragedy. 's 1905 novel was more than an exquisite chronicle of upper-echelon etiquette. The happiest thing about Terence Davies' "The House of Mirth" is that it's such a mesmerizing downer.
0 kommentar(er)
