In The House of Mirth (2001), a Terrence Davies film, Gillian Anderson offers no real surprises as Lily Bart.  But she does offer skill, having an almost childlike quality and the capacity to move us.  Eric Stoltz, as Laurence Seldon, does nothing either particularly right or particularly wrong, but Laura Linney, as Bertha Dorset, is true and wonderfully self-confident.  She and Anderson are the best actors here.  Add to this the spot-on costumes and production design and you have . . . well, not quite the Edith Wharton novel from which this commendable movie was adapted.  It makes me ambivalent in a way the great novel never could.

This is the one about the woman who, without being shallow, wants to marry a man with money, but does not do so.  Instead she suffers and ultimately dies, doing so as a tragic heroine more than as a victim–something Terrence Davies fails to understand.  Thus he has Lily Bart not so much living as simply going downhill.  Moreover, the Lily of the novel rightly appreciates the finer things in life, certainly including material things, but the film never points this up.  It knows Miss Bart isn’t shallow but that’s about it.  She might as well be a thoroughgoing stock heroine.

Yes, Anderson tries to rescue Lily but she can’t–can’t rescue her from what Davies has done.  Though the film has its virtues, it does not understand the novel’s virtues.

Cover of The House of Mirth

China’s Zhang Yimou is a great film director, but House of Flying Daggers (2004) is no Ju Dou or To Live or Not One Less.  These films are gripping successes, whereas the ’04 effort is a mildly serious entertainment with the absurd action of the cheap 1980s Hong Kong fare.

It’s ingeniously made, visually spellbinding, but Zhang should not have gone the Crouching Tiger route.  Purveyed is a sagging story about the female member of a rebel group, the House of Flying Daggers, and the guardian captain who is in fact a government agent.  A flatly superficial period piece, it belongs to a genre which isn’t big enough for Zhang.  Lovely women, particularly Ziyi Zhang, are too Amazon-like, as physically superhuman as the men, and we wonder how it can be that both men and women here are even destructible.  Their martial arts are god-like, you see.  The climax is as nicely, darkly tragic as the climaxes of many other Zhang films, but it hardly prevents Daggers from being a bold nonentity.

House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

In addition to being very foul-mouthed, Jake Kasdan’s The TV Set (1997) is an obvious, not always credible, and eminently unfunny satire on the squalid thinking we’ve witnessed for years in the television industry.  In many ways it’s the poor man’s–no, the loser’s–Idiocracy.

Cover of The TV Set

Not long after Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) begins, the eponymous main character (Elizabeth Olsen) runs away from the young people’s commune she’s been living in for two years and begins to live with her sister and her sister’s husband in Connecticut–and, boy, does erratic behavior come about!  Martha left the commune because she found it to be a wicked place, but her own psyche is now crashing and burning.

Is Martha attracted to communal living because she has an unhinged mind?  Or does communal living associated with evil create within her an unhinged mind?  Such questions arise while viewing this artistic thriller of sorts written and directed by Sean Durkin.  All in all, however, not much thought is required of us re the film.  For a portrait of ugly realities, it is wholly unprofound.  But it’s certainly watchable: as “carefully constructed” (J. Hoberman) as it is unusual.  After Martha’s craziness almost wrecks one of her relatives’ parties, she falls back exhausted on her bed before the longest fade-to–black I’ve ever seen ends the sequence.  Earlier, Durkin gives us a fine sequence in which Martha’s sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), in a long shot, jumps out of her lawn chair over the sight of Martha skinny dipping in a nearby lake.

When the acting isn’t good, it is extraordinary, as in Olsen’s case.  One of the Olsen twins, Elizabeth still has the marvelous eyes she had as a child as well as a perfect understanding of the character she is playing.  Even when she gets emotional, her Martha is never very far from the psychotically subdued person she has perhaps always been.

(The photo is of Elizabeth Olsen and Sean Durkin.)

Image by Getty Images via @daylife