Recencies van critici

Davies’ romantic style—with its sumptuous production design, graceful camera movements, and a musical flow of imagery—connotes a longing for something better than what we’re seeing, and this mood, sustained over the course of nearly two and a half hours, accumulates into a feeling of profound tragedy.

Beneath its gorgeous, colour-saturated façade, rages a brutal, near-barbaric world of oppressive social rituals and expectations; a "horror movie", where words are deadly weapons. In this way, and in its description of the strangulating effect of Lily Bart's (Gillian Anderson) social alienation, The House of Mirth is an essential Davies film.

Davies' eye is inexplicably compassionate: both a reflection of and a response to the rules and conventions that prevent his heroes from seeing their longing realized. There is a warmth, a richness, even a sensuality to Davies' style that is completely absent from the chilly, soulless grandeur of his new milieu.

The formality of relationships, the harshly judgmental and moralizing repression of wide swaths of authentic emotion, the enforced rigidity of manners all combine to torment a free-spirited, open-hearted woman such as the movie's protagonist—and also to inspire an ornamental graciousness, a sublime surface sheen, and an exquisite intricacy of artifice such as our own freer and less-inhibited age is unlikely to inspire.

It's so exquisitely wrought and seamlessly shaped that it almost needs to be scrutinized with a magnifying glass as though a diamond. The problem with such subtle artistry is that you actually need to be looking at it to notice its flawlessness.

Davies produces a film less witty than Wharton's book (though he has his moments), trying to achieve a certain lightness with very mannered behavior in the first act that misses the mark. What the film lacks in wit, it makes up for in soulfulness. Gillian Anderson is perfect, depicting an ordinary woman who has learned imperfectly what it takes to realize other people's ambitions for her and who never achieves anything for herself but to maintain her self-respect.

Observing that the decorum of gentile society often masks boundless barbarity and seething passions isn't novel, but rubbing this up against the quiet elegance of Davies's crisp aesthetic makes The House of Mirth amongst the best, queerest of all historical films.

[Lily's] attitude brings to mind William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience. Hunt was very much obsessed with social mores and, like Davies, his use of light and composition played an integral role in his aesthetic universe. Both Hunt's painting and Davies's film are hauntingly hung up on heroines possessed and suffocated not only by the people around them but the actual physical space they inhabit.

Following Wharton's lead, Davies presents a point of view that's relentlessly downcast and bleak but far from staid, with sharp digressions into a brutal comedy of manners. Meticulously detailed and beautifully performed, The House Of Mirth may be branded conventional by Davies' standards, but it's an assured and welcome change of pace.

Throughout the film, the overall union of voice, physical movement and visual design is devastating: every note of humiliation, degradation and self-deception is struck perfectly but without romantic emphasis, in a horrifying sonata of redemption denied.

An absolutely exemplary literary costume drama--in that it captures what is enduring in its aged source material and extends profoundly into the present--Terence Davies' The House of Mirth is one of the year's best movies, and it's no small amazement that one of the primary reasons why is Edith Wharton herself.

Davies brings his elegant aestheticism to bear for the first time on a strong story line and succeeds superbly.