Terence Davies' "The House of Mirth" - Classic or Dud?

i have no basis for this but it's possible that Anderson is the kind of beauty that might have been thought striking at the time the book is set.

scorsese's film... davies likes it a lot. i liked it when i saw it (when it came out). should see it again.

"A 'hat movie'" -- Richard Roeper

Love it (especially Linney), of course.

Scorsese's TAOI wasn't guilty at all of "tasteful lit adap" shit -- as he said, it's Goodfellas by other means. All that great stuff he did w/ lighting, irises, slo-mo etc.

feminism = trendiness ???

Dr. M - i like the film, but visual tricks are always part of his act, i guess he just used more genteel ones in this instance. it's been ages since i've seen it, but i remember the narration as being a bit too much at times.

I'm not sure what Wharton would have made of it, but I'm not absolutely convinced that she wouldn't have approved. Scorcese, otoh, made the unforgiveable mistake of casting Winona Ryder in his film.

I kept imagining Sigourney Weaver in the part.

Really surprised to see no other thread on The Long Day Closes or indeed the new film, OF TIME AND THE CITY. I haven't seen his others, just this new one, tonight. It's been hailed as the beautiful elegaic work of Britain's greatest surviving auteur, or something, etc.

Guess what?

It's pretty terrible !!!

aye DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES = the best british movie of the last 20-odd years.

Bored me rigid, I'm afraid.

My favourite British movie of the last 20 years - Prospero's Books, though I freely admit I'm probably alone in holding that view.

Yes, OT&TC was disappointingly drab I thought, and I think reviewers are talking it up in the hope that TD might get a more substantial commission as a result of the hype. Davies himself is very good value however! (Though someone should have stopped him from doing the voiceover of his own film. He should take a leaf out of Chris Marker's book.) The screening I saw, they practically had to drag him offstage from the after-screening Q&A, he was such a relentlessly charming ham. He managed to proposition a member of the audience and recite a substantial chunk of the Four Quartets within the first 5 minutes!

Disappointing to hear these negative reports; sounded like it was right up my street. Perhaps literally. Back when it was all cobbles and you could leave yr door open.

But, I'm unlikely to see it (or anything else) in the cinema at the moment so, unless Terry D gets that CSI: Guinea Gap Baths commission from Five I'll just have to painstakingly work my way through DVSL, a frame at a time, until they rebuild the Gaumont and send the ghost of Bill Dean round in a Ford Zephyr to take me there.

CSI: Guinea Gap Baths !!!

There is a sequence in the new film showing, I think, a ferry trip (though there's very little about the ferry) to a day out on the beach at New Brighton. I'm not sure but perhaps that's the closest it gets to Mike's street?

Given the direness of this new film, I don't see that much reason to hope that TD gets a more substantial commission. I'd rather someone buried him under a dilapidated terraced house.

As for reciting Four Quartets: well, he recites a substantial chunk of it in the film too, so this seems a bit like Mel Gibson going out to promote a film and impressing people by reciting dialogue from it. The use of that poem seemed to me lazy and fairly inapt - but still superior to most of the rest of the script, which was remarkably awful.

The fact is, and it is indeed, I shouldn't wonder, a fact, that if you took the visual element of this film and asked Steady Mike to write and record a voiceover for it, in whatever mixture of moods (elegy, comedy, etc) he chose, the result would be about one hundred times better. Or eighty times? Or two hundred or five hundred times? An awful lot better, anyway - I mean it, an almost unimaginable amount better.

someone should have shouted out "oi terry who done miss you bow wow then? hyuk hyuk"

I think the problem with OT&TC is largely that it was made on a miniscule budget, and I imagine to a very particular City of Culture brief. I'm sure if a studio or even an enlightened BBC4 gave one of his projects proper backing, he could still amaze. For Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, he is, still, the most brilliantly lyrical British director since Humphrey Jennings, I think.

Patrick Keillor's films aren't exactly high budget but there's more than enough imagination to make up for that.

If it was made to a "very particular City of Culture brief" I'm surprised that he gets away with skipping over the Beatles so firmly.

I think the problem with OT&TC is that it was made by a self-satisfied bore. Let me expand for a moment on the extraordinary poverty of this acclaimed film.

Maybe we should be warned by the portentous title (it’s really not much of a city film – but that 'of'!), and by the lazy strapline 'a love song and a memory' – this is not good. From the small audience watching it alongside me, some walk out midway. Archive footage, pretty average, nothing you couldn’t see elsewhere. The most standout footage is of young people at clubs and bars today – again, nothing too special, but more appealing and moving to me than any other pictures here. Davies’ narrating voice (carrying no trace of Liverpool - which may be an original twist, more surprising than having Ringo or Michael Angelis do it in a sense, but also rather distances you from the city which never comes alive in this picture anyway) is obnoxious, full of histrionic spitting which I suppose is supposed to be funny – but it never is funny, for the self-satisfied script is so dreadfully banal and ill-written.

He smugly attributes lines to writers like Joyce and Chekhov – but they’re lines that don’t reflect those writers’ talent at all. He quotes great chunks of Four Quartets: OK, it’s about Time, but what a lazy way to talk about time - to fill time, indeed, to kill screen time; and what does TSE have to do with Liverpool, la? He goes on about Catholicism, protesting his atheism – ok, so why keep going on about it? Don't tell me: once a Catholic, always a Catholic, or some BS like that. Well, Steady Mike refreshingly told me that was false about a decade ago; but in any case, TD's relation to religion, or anything, is just NOT INTERESTING, no more worth putting on screen than anyone else's.

His payoffs, punchlines and would-be wit are painful. He actually enunciates ‘all the fun of the fair’ over a shot of a fairground; he talks of Suez as a last hurrah for Victorian Empire when much of the map was red (should that be pink?). These lines are meant to be redeemed by irony somehow - but they float nowhere, they make the author seem a wheezing windbag who hasn't coined a phrase of his own in decades. It all lacks any purchase, any incision on the material; it’s desperately flailing. The obvious formal comparison for me is Keiller -- but how much Keiller shows and talks about reality, how little he gets lost in his own uninteresting head, and how interested he is in the present day – as well as the history that has gone into it.

He plays 'He Ain't Heavy' at some length over shots of soldiers in the 1950s, cos his brother was a soldier. The main interest here for me is just to listen to the structure of that Hollies track, hear the circulation of the chords: I don't need Terence Davies to make me do this, Dale Winton could cue it more amiably. He plays 'The Folks Who Live On The Hill' over shots of tower blocks: what bludgeoning, ill-wielded sarcasm, getting us nowhere near a real analysis of what did and didn't work about such reconstruction. All this was at least a lot more briskly done in The Rock & Roll Years about 25 years ago. He even dares to sneer at the Beatles: yes, this unprolific artist whose current claims to artistry are entirely undermined by this lame film has the nerve to sniff at the greatest, most dazzlingly productive artistic talent Britain has produced since Virginia Woolf. 'Yeah yeah yeah' he gurns over some footage of them. No, no, no.

Maybe you should see some of his proper films before dismissing him as a self-satisfied bore?

See, THIS is the sort of criticism I want to read in Guardian Film & Music.

If he doesn't think this is a proper film, why is he releasing it in cinemas, and why is it being hailed as 'one of the cinematic events of the year'? If he doesn't rate it or think it represents his talent properly, then he could have suppressed it.

But yes, I'm sure his other films must, indeed, be better than this.

where has this film been "acclaimed" as "one of the cinematic events of the year", and by whom?

Just to save everyone else a lot of time and money:

Distant Voices, Still Lives - bullying, half-dead dad, tell me something I don't know. I knew Bill Douglas. Tel, you're no Bill Douglas.

The Long Day Closes - dead from the neck down David Thomson-friendly cack which invites us to think that sitting in front of a cinema screen watching films constitutes cinema (see also Cinema Paradiso).

The Neon Bible - a grave insult to John Kennedy O'Toole.

The House Of Mirth - a graver insult to Edith Wharton.

It has been acclaimed as 'undoubtedly one of the cinematic events of the year' by an anonymous writer of publicity materials for it.

watching that Mark Cousins show The History Of Film i was thinking 'i bet he doesn't mention Terence Davies' but then he did, and raved about him and interviewed him too.

I've watched this film at last. Beautifully made, shot, designed. Gillian Anderson seems to perform tremendously. But I couldn't really understand on what basis her character was 'ruined'. Maybe this social scene is beyond my ken.

great movie is this. All the characters in it have few redeeming features but still the path to ruin is a universal theme and I always get a bit teary at the end.

one of my favs

If you feel that way, Calzino, you should read Wharton's book. It may be my favourite novel and have read it 5 times at least. The End of the film is not quite the end of the film or, at least, you're not quite as sure as you are in the film, what actually happened.

Actually, an ex of mine bought me a beautiful old copy of the book as a "sorry I broke up with you" present because he knew how much the book meant to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

weird that it came up on two different threads though, Plax mentioned it on another thread.

I've never read any Wharton nor felt inclined to, but now I feel like I should try some!

I reread The Custom of the Country 10 days ago to remind myself of how merciless she can be. Please read her.

Wharton is absolutely amazing. Please do.

xpost yes, Alfred. It's merciless and humane at the same time. There's nothing like it. I don't think even James made a character as ruthless as Lily Bart that you care about and root for.

That Davis carried that off in his adaptation is a big achievement

I love the neon Bible but I think everyone hates that movie

I've never seen it but everyone hates it, yes. I've hated Davis films that were well received but Distant Voices, Still Lives is all-time great, top 5, at times top 1, for me. I had to stop watching the Dickinson film because I was embarrassed for him, that he put that put there, so I'm all over the place with him.

Yeah distant voices is amazing. I basically had a nervous breakdown the first time I saw it

Neon Bible shares aspects of it s staginess and the very mannered idealised refraction through a child's memories. It's sort of too weird to 'fail' imo whereas the later stuff looks atrocious. I feel like mirth is the only time he managed to do a ,'straight' film well. Gillian Anderson is excellent in it, I like her in theory but this is the only thing I've seen her in that I thought she was amazing in, she gets the messiness of the character over so well

Yes.

xps

I thought the Dickinson film was brilliant as well tbh. But I recall you not liking Sunset Song either, Jed - which also I liked! I think I might have to overcome my hatred of Tom Hiddlestone and get round to watching Deep Blue Sea soonish.

yeah Gillian Anderson is burning bright in HoM. Amazing performance.

amazing direction from TD as well. Her transition from arch-socialite playing the game to realising the game is finished is done without any mawkish nonsense. Which makes it all the more powerful.

I did but I don't really want to get into it :)

GA has been brilliant, at times, and is VERY good in this. I think she's a bit too pleased with herself now and that gets in the way. Helen Mirren is the same, like she can't get over herself.

xpost

There wasn't anything wrong with Dan Ackroyd's performance, it just seemed to me that he was trying very hard to Be Serious and it came across as stilted.
Otherwise this was great, although with a little less mirth than advertised.

laura linney is also quite a force in this

i had a crush on eric stolz in this film lol

i recall a particularly beautiful scene where we see a garden pond being rained on for a solid minute or so? i should really watch this again soon but i'm afraid i don't have the heart for this kind of story anymore, i'm too fragile now lol.

Yes, it blends very slowly into a shot of the house with the furniture covered with dust-sheets.

The fade-in showing the bow of the ship from which Lily's eventually banished is just....

Terence Davies' "The House of Mirth" - Classic or Dud?

Heh, sorry meant to put on the POLL thread

inspired by discussion here, tried to watch last night on Paramount+ and the image quality was so poor I had to bail (local libraries don't own, unfortunately)(watched Cop Land instead, sticking with a New York story, lol)

Laura Linney's smile would stop bullets.

lol

Was wondering about that Paramount+ copy

Eleanor Bron audiobook seems good

this screen at moving image this past weekend in 35mm, sorry to have missed it!

Yeah, luckily I saw the reminder on the other thread. I went on Sunday so I missed the Koresky intro but I’ll live.