Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Terence Davies, the great, singular director, died this week. In more than one of my reviews of Davies' work I say something like "No one else makes movies like this," and that was true. Here are a couple of reprints, of a piece on The House of Mirth (possibly written for film.com, or maybe Cinemania?) and one on A Quiet Passion (Seattle Weekly). Also, one memory: At some Seattle International Film Festival in the early 90s, I attended a screening of "The Terence Davies Trilogy" with Richard Linklater, who visited SIFF that year. At the end of the screening of those three tough, bleak short films, Linklater turned to me and said, "Well—he's a filmmaker." An accurate summation. But here are some more words.
The House of Mirth
Gillian Anderson’s performance as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth is weirdly un-modern—the actress seems to have tapped directly into the mindset of the Edith Wharton novel, to a style predating ironic distance. Anderson maintains this even though the film's dialogue and line readings are (rightly so) pitched in a way that heightens the artificial nature of the New York social scene, circa 1905. The performance often has a trapped, corseted intensity, and Anderson gets Lily's tragedy: it's not that Lily doesn’t understand the rules of the game, it's that she does, but she thinks her wit and beauty can skirt that calcified code.
Anderson is especially compelling in her scenes with Eric Stoltz, as the lawyer Lawrence Selden, who should be Lily's mate but is not in the correct economic bracket for her status as a socialite. We understand from the way they light each other's cigarettes that they are meant to be together (that time-honored form of movie shorthand), but neither is capable of taking the step across tangled expectations and hesitations. Which is how Lily puts herself in position for her downfall, as a financial arrangement with the piglike Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd, physically a dead ringer for the book's Gus) turns into a series of social gaffes that eventually bloom into scandal.
The stylized quality of these social encounters is right up the alley of director Terence Davies, whose previous "memory films" are composed with a painterly eye—somehow both stark and lush. In The House of Mirth, Davies captures the surfaces of privilege, and keeps them surfaces. (Curiously, the one scene that seems short-changed is Lily's appearance as "Summer" in a tableau vivant at a party. The phenomenon of the tableau isn't explained for anyone unfamiliar with it, and the stunning effect of Lily's beauty on the men is left implied.)
Davies has cast some amazing faces in the picture: the strange angles of Jodhi May, as Lily's apparently innocent cousin, the ghostly severity of Eleanor Bron (unrecognizable as the deft comedienne from 1960s British films) as the disappointed matriarch of Lily's family, the cagey practicality of Anthony LaPaglia as the outsider financier Rosedale. Laura Linney is devious as Bertha Dorset, Lily's nemesis—now this is a modern performance. Linney owns the film when Bertha sizes up the various vectors of power and desire at an opera house; as her satisfied face slides behind the black curtain of her box, a shudder passes through Lily's world.
If the rhythm of the film is stately, it nevertheless always feels alive—there's a push-pull going on in every scene that creates a buzz: the tension between one's inner life and the outer world, the distance between things spoken and the more important things left unsaid, the withholding of information on principle, the language of glances. The only thing I really missed from the novel was the quickness and depth of Lily's wit (and yes, wit can be profound), which adds another level to her tragedy. The casting coup of Gillian Anderson—watching a science-fiction goddess tackle Wharton—is itself a kind of push-pull event. With all the other pleasures of the film, it offers the exhilaration of an actress arriving.
A Quiet Passion
A biopic of Emily Dickinson sounds like a terrible idea, and it probably would be if it unfolded along conventional lines. But what if it were as unconventional as Dickinson's poetry? I don't mean a movie that is la-di-dah "poetic," with out-of-focus shots of blossoms falling as classical music plays. What if the cinematic approach to the poet's life could approximate her eccentric punctuation—full of dashes where commas usually roam—her abrupt shifts in focus, and her piercing gaze at eternity? If you could do that you'd have A Quiet Passion, an appropriately odd film from the British director Terence Davies.
Davies first came to wide attention with his mournful Liverpool elegies Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), and those films already show him working in a peculiar style, less intent on storytelling than in conjuring up moods and places—with a strong feeling for the courage of people who go about the business of getting through the day. Still, a film about Dickinson is a chancy endeavor. Her poetry is one thing, but Dickinson's life was marked by illnesses and reclusiveness. And forget about the usual biopic rise to fame; locked in her Amherst obscurity, Dickinson had only a handful of poems published in her lifetime.
We first encounter the poet as a young woman (played by Emma Bell), steadfastly resisting religious indoctrination while briefly enrolled at college. Her household is fully pious, but her wealthy father (Keith Carradine) is too fond of his unusual daughter to force her to attend Sunday service. An elegant segue takes us a few years into the future, where we settle into rounds of domestic duties and lively visitors. There's also a hint of literary ambition, and as the film goes on, we infer that Dickinson's inability to have her work appreciated is connected to the pall that settles over her youthful gaiety.
For a movie that includes a lot of chatter about eternity, A Quiet Passion has a strange feeling for time. We're given few indicators—except the passing of the Civil War—about how long any of this is taking. And most intriguingly, when we come upon Emily as an adult, she is played by Cynthia Nixon, who is clearly older than the character at that point. I think this is deliberate on Davies' part, bending realism so that Dickinson exists in a timeless way. Nixon, though, skillfully alters her performance as the years go by: at first she's alight with wit and curiosity, as though she's going to burn through her 19th-century corsets; later, she's wearied by duties and expectations. The film leaves no question that Dickinson's setbacks, while certainly tied up in her own distinctive personality, are also very much about being a woman in a man's world.
Nixon is a renowned stage actress who is famous because of her role in Sex and the City, a bizarre career joke. (And if you were wondering how to get from Sarah Jessica Parker to Emily Dickinson with one degree of separation, you see how easy it is.) In this film Nixon is a giant, all the more so for playing a role with built-in constraints. As Emily's sister Vinnie, Jennifer Ehle is superb, and Duncan Duff and Jodhi May are just right as Emily's brother and sister-in-law. But here we get into one of the film's weirdnesses. These performances, and the dialogue that comes out of them, are skewed in such a way that they land somewhere between realism and theatricality. Sometimes characters pose as though waiting for the still camera to click, other times the lighting reminds us of a painting.
Even if that style gives uneven results, the overall effect is powerful. The movie's title sounds worthy of a paperback from the gift shop at the airport, but in this case it's earned. For as much as the English house and the proper costumes suggest a tasteful Masterpiece Theatre sort of experience, there's a wild and fiery spirit blazing beneath the exterior. To prove the rightness of that approach, simply read the poems.
October 13, 2023
