Quotation:

1.          The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence were made by Catholic artists consumed with the theme of spiritual suffering in a world that fails to recognize its viability. In both stories, the protagonists, both intelligent, are trapped in prison house built from words, customs, prohibitions, the currency of a tortuous society they’re tying to manipulate, subvert or transcend, but with which they’re finally complicit. Both filmmakers employ horror film tactics at crucial moments (the darkened framing around Bron, the Godzillishly edited extension of Winona Ryder’s dress train as she gets up from her chair to deliver the final blow to Daniel Day-Lewis). And whereas Davies builds the horror right up to the final scene, Scorsese employs it sparingly, ending The Age in a bitter resignation.

2.          Of course, there’s a crucial difference. Scorsese’s film is based on a book about a weak-willed man who finally won’t defy the world of which he’s a part, once he sees how high the odds are stacked against him. Whereas Davies’s film is based on a book about a woman who never has a chance, who tries to beat her hair-raising society at its own game: that is, to take it as its word morally, and offer herself as  a beacon by accepting neither help nor love when it’s offered, never understanding that it’s all a sham until it’s too late. And Davies hits every note with hair raising clarity: the flow of polite smiles, cunning sentences and gorgeous gestures, and the coded recognitions of nervous breaks in the rhythm (the pouring of tea is fraught with significance and danger); the humiliation that slowly spreads throughout Lily, like darkness falling over a city (registered in sharp, vivid, precise inflections—Davies and Anderson make quite an actor-director team); the strong sense of Lily as the magnetic centre by which everyoneis attracted and repelled, heaping her with scorn and indifference as they go.