Laura Linney, as Bertha Dorset, the woman who takes advantage of Lily's uncertain social position to use her as a pawn in a devious game, is like a barracuda in Parisian silks; her liquid-sun smile is a chilling mask for her treachery. Jodhi May brings just the right amount of forlorn jealousy to the role of Lily's plain cousin, Grace Stepney. Bron's Mrs. Peniston is an imposing figure, but one whose simple motivations (she must maintain her dignity at all costs) are clear and sometimes amusing. With her steely pompadour and impatient pronouncements disguised as requests ("Lily, you can read me the obituaries!"), she's like Camille Paglia on quaaludes.

But it's the men in Lily's life who have the biggest effect on her, not because her life revolves around them but because they all wish that it could -- their weakness is a key feature of their cruelty and cluelessness. As Trenor, the man who believes he has "bought" Lily by making a simple financial investment for her, Aykroyd is shiveringly menacing, down to the way his sense of entitlement booms forth in his hearty, too-loud voice. Anthony LaPaglia makes a sympathetic and believable Sim Rosedale, the Jewish outsider who's also jockeying for a place in society but whose money (not to mention his sex) means he'll have a better shot at gaining it than Lily will. Rosedale's motives for courting Lily are mixed and his manners are crude, but LaPaglia's performance cuts directly to Rosedale's innate decency.

Stoltz plays Selden, the most maddening character of all for the way his emotional ineffectuality hides so safely behind intellectual pomposity, as a kind of waxen sex symbol. It's a canny, cool performance: You can see why Lily would be drawn to his sly, appraising smile, even as it's obvious that his character is only sterling, while hers is stronger stuff.

Anderson's Lily is the kind of heroine who earns our protectiveness by never begging for it; it's an astonishing performance. With her milk-white skin and berry-ripe lips, and her effortlessly graceful carriage, she's the kind of girl who would make an admirable decoration on some fine gentleman's arm. But there's a liveliness and a knowingness about her eyes that set her apart from her peers. In an early scene, as she shares a cigarette with Selden, the tendrils of smoke frame her appraising gaze. The moment is time-stoppingly sensual, but Anderson roughs it up a bit; she's sexually predatory in a vaguely prickly way, a gorgeous creature who's inherently affronted by the idea that she should have to entrap, rather than simply enchant, a husband.

In a later scene, the camera focuses on her in the split moments before and after she unexpectedly catches sight of Selden, and in that tiny window of time, like a stop-motion photograph of a flower turning its face to the sun, her features register a shift from deeply troubled self-involvement and confusion to distilled, radiant pleasure. It's not that she expects Selden to save her; it's simply that in looking at him, she finds a way out of herself.

But there's also plenty of showbiz in Lily Bart. You see it when she takes part in a dinner party tableau as a living re-creation of a Watteau painting. A curtain opens to reveal Lily reclining in a voraciously resplendent white dress, looking as if she could eat the male half of the admiring crowd alive. By the picture's end, though, as Lily finds her life more difficult to navigate, her vibrant beauty may be muted, but it's never vanquished. In the last portion of Davies' film, Anderson is shot as a symphony of grayish-blue shadows, but it's impossible for us to mistake Lily's somberness for any kind of redemption. Anderson plays her as a woman who doesn't need to be redeemed; she needed only to be understood, and the men and women around her failed miserably. She was undone by the wrongness of the air around her.

Anderson and Davies put me so squarely in Edith Wharton's New York that I left the theater not quite knowing where I was. Since I'm lucky enough at a moment like this to actually live in New York, I walked along the southern edge of Central Park, where I could see the beaux-arts lampposts -- authentic relics of Wharton's Manhattan -- glowing among the nighttime winter-cold trees. There were horses, too, lined up along the edge of the park with their hansom cabs attached, but in the darkness their smell was more vivid than their rough outlines.

Which century is this again? Wharton's story, and Davies', takes place at the opening of a different one, one that held forth all kinds of promises, some of which it at least partially fulfilled, especially for women. But as Anderson plays her, Lily Bart isn't any kind of feminist symbol; she's simply a woman who doesn't fit, regardless of when and where she lives or of her place in society. This early-21st century air might have killed her, too. And yet I understood completely why she'd want to breathe it in. After all, what else is there?

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