House of Mirth (2000) – 4.8

Gillian Anderson’s one shot at an Oscar, and a very distant one at that.  Anderson plays the doomed heroine, Lily Bart, of Edith Wharton’s early, artless novel of the same title.  Many of the film’s problems are due to the ridiculous casting; it is as if the casting director wanted to make a stiff costume movie with the most unlikely of actors (Anderson, Dan Ackroyd, Anthony LaPaglia, and Eric Stoltz??), and such endeavors can only die a miserable death.  The film also suffers from a mawkish premise – a beautiful woman ruined by the rumors of a sex scandal is simply too light an affair for today’s jaded audiences.  What is left is a film that would be subpar fare for Masterpiece Theatre and is, at best, a poor man’s version of Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence.