In bringing Wharton's book to the screen, Davies takes care to get all the trappings right: the depressively glittering balls and parties of turn-of-the-century Manhattan society life, the faux-rustic opulence of the country homes of the rich, the weird formalities and subtexts lurking behind the way a woman might slip her daintily gloved hand into that of a man. In Wharton's view, and in Davies', it's an atmosphere that's welcoming on the surface but laced with poison gas, a precise arrangement of molecules that seeks and finds and chokes the life out of foreign creatures, like Wharton's great heroine Lily Bart, who need air and light and love. It takes one exquisite alien to play Bart. Davies found her in Gillian Anderson.

Davies' "The House of Mirth" is nothing like a science-fiction movie, of course, except in the way it uses atmosphere to impart a creeping pallor of claustrophobia and even menace. What's clear from the first frame -- as it's clear in Wharton's novel -- is that Lily is a creature who just doesn't belong in this world; what's heartbreaking is that she's convinced she does.

The trick of the story, though, is that we're not really sure where Lily belongs; Wharton's conclusion is that there are no definable economic, social or spiritual strata that are quite right for her, and Davies' movie, with all its bleak elegance, captures the essence of that rootless restlessness. A stunningly beautiful but unmarried woman of 29 with dwindling prospects, Lily has been raised to believe she deserves luxury. So she lives beyond her means, relying largely on the grudging charity of her elderly aunt, Mrs. Peniston (Eleanor Bron). What Lily lacks in money she makes up for in tricks of language and coquetry: She can turn any encounter into a flirtatious checkmate. Yet her game playing, as Wharton wrote it and as Anderson plays it, isn't rooted in unkindness. It's more a special brand of freewheeling inventiveness, such that her would-be love interest and sometime nemesis Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz) is dazzled by it. "I always like to see what you're doing," he tells her only half-teasingly. "You're such a wonderful spectacle."

To keep herself afloat financially, Lily needs a husband badly, but she's unsuccessful in landing one because, deep down, she knows she doesn't want one. She's most attracted to Selden, a lawyer of modest means who lives for books and art and a warm fire. But not even Selden is a haven for her -- he proves himself capable of shattering coldness. And after Lily unwittingly puts herself in a compromised position with a married friend, Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd), she finds herself having to make her own money to support herself.

Davies understands that Wharton's book isn't a rallying cry for women's emotional and financial independence. It's far more subtle, and a lot less cheerful, than that. But the story continually affirms the value of that independence, solely by showing us how tantalizingly it's kept out of poor Lily's reach.

Davies captures something of Wharton's reserved warmth and graceful rhythms in the way he sets Lily spinning on her slow spiral to tragedy. He takes a few liberties with the story, condensing, for example, two of Wharton's original characters into one. His "House of Mirth" is a stately movie, sometimes too much so, moving with the speed and sprightliness of a dowager aunt, and the dialogue -- much of it taken directly from the novel -- is sometimes stiff and awkward.

But Davies (with the help of cinematographer Remi Adefarasin) does an impeccable job of showing us, in the movie's first half, both the hypnotic comforts and the deadliness of the life Lily aspires to, with its picture-perfect drawing rooms and artificially vivacious parties. The second half is darker and more visually somber, as Lily struggles to keep her life together. But that glumness makes it clear that this less-glamorous existence isn't right for Lily, either. She's an exotic bird, unfit for the grime and filth of the workaday world but far too extraordinary to be serving tea to rich, dimwitted gentlepeople. Lily, too modern, too vital and too exquisite, fits nowhere, in no specific society, time or place.

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