By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * * * * )
Martin Scorsese remarked, in deadly earnest, that his adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence was his most violent film.
Coming from the man who made Taxi Driver and GoodFellas, it was a curious claim but invited a striking reading of a film which, on its surface at least, was claustrophobically measured and restrained.
Certainly Terence Davies, whose short memoirs of childhood in working-class Liverpool, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, were rapturously beautiful cinematic tone poems, finds the dark and violent heart of Wharton's earlier novel The House of Mirth in this peerless adaptation.
And his casting is neatly subversive, too: The X Files' Gillian Anderson is the benighted central character and Dan Aykroyd, her eerily complacent nemesis, a mile away from his Ghostbusters persona.
Anderson plays Lily Bart, a young woman burdened by debt, who arrives in New York in 1905 in search of a husband. What follows is a ritualised mating dance, full of intrigue and double-cross as the unprincipled and hypocritical members of the social circle she contrives to penetrate seek to take advantage of her in various ways and as Lily's personal ambition wrestles with her moral scruples.
Davies signals the arc of the story from the very first frame as Lily, like that other great doomed heroine, Anna Karenina, emerges in silhouette from the steam on a railway platform.
But for most of the film's length, Davies' camera roams uneasily through gorgeously dressed interiors while managing to underline the sense that this refined environment is a tangled moral jungle.
Anderson rises magnificently to the challenge of a role both complicated and textured - her climactic breakdown is harrowingly convincing - but she is abetted by magnificent supporting performances. Linney (You Can Count On Me, The Truman Show) is magnificently brittle as a married socialite with her own deception in mind and LaPaglia, as a tragically decent man whose offer of rescue Lily spurns, is typical of the restraint of the whole cast.
The film abounds in meticulously observed detail - snatched glances and fleeting touches seem to resound almost deafeningly - and the script is rich in pungent epigram which at times ("It's much safer to be fond of dangerous people") seem almost Wildean. The pace, at once dreamlike and contemplative, will seem slow to some, but the net effect is profoundly absorbing.
Cast: Gillian Anderson, Dan Aykroyd, Anthony LaPaglia, Laura Linney, Eric Stoltz
Director: Terence Davies
Rating: M
Running time: 140 mins
Screening: Rialto, Bridgeway
House of Mirth
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