Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth is one of the most tragic works among the classic works of literary fiction. It must have taken immense passion and dedication for Terence Davies to adapt it into the movie released in 2000.
To a great degree, the movie stays faithful to the novel and follows the journey of struggling socialite Lily Bart in her New York City circle of friends and peer. The latter, as happens in Wharton’s works, are more of foes and rivals that unofficially work in tandem to bring down the one who doesn’t play by their rules. And such is the story of Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson) whose weak start and strong morals work to her detriment, making her slide down the social ladder while clinging to her starving love for Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz).
While maintaining much of the novel’s plot, The House of Mirth benefits from its great cast of the finest actors playing roles that fit them well. However, it does suffer from notable shortcomings when placed next to Wharton’s novel, notably from those that are the result of exclusion and fail to convey the full impact of Lily’s dilemma.
In the novel The House of Mirth, there are a lot of silent moments of thought in the narrator’s voice – something very difficult to present on the screen especially if the filmmaker is avoiding voiceover. Thus the exclusion of the commentary in the meetings between Lily and Selden, especially the climactic final meeting, leaves a void in the movie readily visible to the novel’s fans. Lily meeting with Nettie Struther and interacting with her baby girl are among the most powerful moments in the novel and the exclusion of that entire sequence is also missed in the movie.
With the rather rushed decline of Lily in the latter half and less impactful ending (again by exclusion of the novel’s commentary about “the word”) leaves Davies’s adaptation far short of the bar set by Wharton’s classic novel. Regardless, this movie is worth seeing as it is the most prominent adaptation available to date to enjoy and direct viewers to the book.
