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.
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