Entertainment Weekly

Possession

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

EW Grade: C

EW Readers Grade: A-

In Possession, Gwyneth Paltrow plays an esteemed British literary professor who's supposed to be an uptight gender-studies feminist, but the moment she walks on screen, wearing her platinum-silk hair up in the sort of bun that once signified soft-core bottled passion, she's the most radiant, swankily sexy poststructuralist you've ever seen. Her costar, Aaron Eckhart, plays an American English scholar, and Eckhart, with a grin that's all frat-house beer and cheer, is similarly afflicted with a too-hot-for-the-room aura. When he takes his shirt off to leap into a river, it's supposed to be a key moment of flirtation, but instead it's the coyest of camp: Eckhart isn't just lean, he's cut (it must be all that time spent shelving items in musty libraries), and Paltrow looks more than ready to devour him.

These two team up for what's meant to be a literary-erotic adventure, going through a stash of hundred-year-old letters that reveal a hidden and explosive love affair. Adapted from A.S. Byatt's 1990 novel, ''Possession'' was cowritten and directed by the formerly savage Neil LaBute (''In the Company of Men''), who, after his screwball stretch with ''Nurse Betty,'' clearly relished the chance to stretch even further. Yet just because LaBute has the inclination, and the competence, to make a decorous academic love story doesn't mean that he's suited to it.

''Possession,'' at heart, was a novel about sitting around reading letters, and the epistolary form doesn't translate. The movie is intelligent yet lifeless; it's all wisps and abstractions. The Victorians, declaring their love by quill pen, are meant to be purer in their passion than the ''liberated'' moderns, but this irony, recycled from ''The French Lieutenant's Woman,'' is tame and old hat now. Each time the film flashes back to the historical amour, there are Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle, letting sensual love dissolve propriety the way it has in every third-rate Brit costume romance since Merchant met Ivory. EW Grade: C

Chicago Sun-Times

*** 1/2 [3 1/2 stars out of 4]

POSSESSION

***1/2 (PG-13)

August 16, 2002

BY ROGER EBERT

A visiting American scholar is paging through an old volume at the British Museum when he comes upon a letter stuffed between the pages--a love letter, it would appear, from Queen Victoria's poet laureate, addressed to a woman not his wife. The poet has been held up for more than a century as a model of marital fidelity. The letter is dynamite. The scholar slips the letter out of the book and into his portfolio, and is soon displaying it, with all the pride and uncertainly of a new father, to a British woman who knows (or thought she knew) everything about the poet.

The American, named Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), is professionally ambitious but has a block against personal intimacy. The British expert, named Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), is suspicious of love, suspicious of men, suspicious of theories that overturn a century of knowledge about her speciality. Together, warily, edgily, they begin to track down the possibility that the happily married Randolph Henry Ash did indeed have an affair with the 19th century feminist and lesbian Christabel LaMotte. Two modern people with high walls of privacy are therefore investigating two Victorians who in theory never even met.

This setup from A.S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel would seem like the last premise in the world to attract director Neil LaBute, whose "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends & Neighbors" were about hard-edged modern sexual warfare. But look again at the romantic fantasies in his overlooked "Nurse Betty" (2000), about a housewife in love with a soap opera character and a killer in love with a photograph of the housewife, and you will see the same premise: Love, fueled by imagination, tries to leap impossible divides.

The film, written by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and LaBute, uses a flashback structure to move between the current investigation and the long-ago relationship. Jeremy Northam plays Ash, an upright public figure, and Jennifer Ehle is Christabel, a pre-Raphaelite beauty who lives with the darkly sensuous Blanche Glover (Lena Headey). The nature of their relationship is one of the incidental fascinations of the movie: At a time before lesbianism was widely acknowledged, female couples were commonly accepted and the possibility of a sexual connection didn't necessarily occur. Blanche is the dominant and possessive one, and Christabel is perhaps not even essentially lesbian, but simply besotted with friendship. When she and Ash make contact, it is Blanche, not Ash's unbending wife, who is the angered spouse.

In the way it moves between two couples in two periods, "Possession" is like Karel Reisz's "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981). That film, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, added a modern couple that didn't exist in the John Fowles novel, and had both couples played by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. The notion of two romances on parallel trajectories is common to both films, and intriguing because there seem to be insurmountable barriers in both periods.

Ash and Christabel are separated by Victorian morality, his marriage and her relationship. The moderns, Maud and Roland, seem opposed to any idea of romance; she has her own agenda, and he is reticent to a fault. "You have nothing to fear from me," he tells her early on, because he avoids relationships. Later, when they find themselves tentatively in each other's arms, he pulls back: "We shouldn't be doing this; it's dangerous."

This might be convincing if Roland and Maud looked like our conventional idea of literary scholars: Mike White, perhaps, paired with Lili Taylor. That they are both so exceptionally attractive is distracting; Paltrow is able to project a certain ethereal bookishness, but a contemporary man with Eckhart's pumped-up physique and adamant indifference to Paltrow would be read by many observers as gay. That he is not--that his reticence is a quirk rather than a choice--is a screenplay glitch we have to forgive.

We do, because the movie is not a serious examination of scholarship or poetry, but a brainy romance. In a world where most movie romances consist of hormonal triggers and plumbing procedures, it's sexy to observe two couples who think and debate their connections, who quote poetry to each other, who consciously try to enhance their relationships by seeking metaphors and symbols they can attach to. Romance defined by the body will decay with the flesh, but romance conceived as a grand idea--ah, now that can still fascinate people a century later.

LaBute is a director who loves the spoken word. No surprise that between movies he writes and directs plays. I suspect he would be incapable of making a movie about people who had nothing interesting to say to one another. What he finds sexy is not the simple physical fact of two people, but the scenario they write around themselves; look at the way the deaf woman in "In the Company of Men" so completely defeats both men by discovering their ideas of themselves and turning those ideas against them. By the end of the movie, with the egos of both men in shards at her feet, the woman seems more desirable than we could have imagined possible.

What happens in "Possession" is not the same, but it is similar enough to explain LaBute's interest in the story. He likes people who think themselves into and out of love, and finds the truly passionate (like Blanche) to be the most dangerous. He likes romances that exist out of sight, denied, speculated about, suspected, fought against. Any two people can fall into each other's arms and find that they enjoy the feeling. But to fall into someone else's mind--now that can be dangerous.

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

Review: 'Possession' a rich romantic tale

Another side of Neil LaBute

August 15, 2002 Posted: 4:14 PM EDT (2014 GMT)

By Paul Clinton

CNN Reviewer

(CNN) -- Who knew that beating in the hirsute chest of filmmaker Neil LaBute -- who brought us the highly cynical and hard-edged films "In The Company Of Men" (1997) and "Your Friends and Neighbors" (1998) -- was the trembling heart of a true romantic?

It's not a faint heart, either. Adapting A.S. Byatt's dense, Booker Prize-winning 1990 novel, "Possession," into a motion picture would be a daunting task for anyone. But this (albeit abridged) screenplay by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones, and LaBute -- who also directed -- does capture a wonderful sense of timelessness between the modern-day lovers, played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, and the Victorian couple played by Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle, as this story jumps back and forth from the 19th to the 21st century.

The very concept of this extremely literary novel practically defies adaptation, and changes have been made. But the core of the story remains the same. Maud Bailey (Paltrow) is a British academic researching a biography of the 19th century poetess Christabel LaMotte (Ehle), who also happens to be a distant relation. Bailey is a rigid, determined young woman with her ice-cool blond mane twisted tightly into a firm, no-nonsense bun.

An American research assistant at the British Museum, Roland Michell (Eckhart), has a lifelong obsession with Randolph Henry Ash (Northam), the (fictitious) poet laureate to Queen Victoria. Michell's unshaven face, just-fell-out-of-bed attitude, and puppy-dog enthusiasm are in sharp contrast to Bailey's cold, calculated approach. They have little in common and, of course, are soon drawn to each other like moths to a flame.

Two researchers, two poets

Michell has a theory that Ash and LaMotte had a passionate affair, despite the facts that Ash was known to be happily married, and LaMotte had a longtime lesbian relationship with a little-known artist, Blanche Glover (Lena Headey). At first, Bailey is just humoring him when she invites him to visit her relatives, Sir George and Lady Bailey, who live in a dilapidated manor house in the country, and are also direct descendants of the famous poetess.

There the two amateur sleuths discover a cache of old love letters proving that Ash and LaMotte did indeed have a relationship, and quite a steamy one at that -- especially by Victorian standards. The film now sweeps beautifully from one period to the other, with exquisitely crafted cinematic transitions between the two stories.

Along the way, the emotions within the two relationships are tested time and again, as all four attempt to follow their hearts despite social and personal pressures.

This production is beautifully mounted and reminiscent of the 1981 film "The French Lieutenant's Woman," scripted by Harold Pinter and based on John Fowles' novel. Not only do both films go back and forth between present day and the Victorian era, but the earlier film starred Meryl Streep, to whom Ehle bears an extraordinary resemblance, especially when she's dressed in the types of period capes and hoods used in both films. The likeness is uncanny. When you add the fact that Ehle is also an excellent actress, the comparisons get almost spooky.

Lust, love and guilt

On the surface, the subject matter of British academia would seem as lifeless as a moon rock, but the characters are genuinely involving, and some of the dialogue is outlandishly witty. Oddly enough, it seems the modern-day lovers are more uptight and carry more emotional baggage then their Victorian counterparts. The result is a romantic melodrama teeming with lust, love, guilt, and raw passion, all wrapped in the splendid visuals provided by cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier.

Once again, Paltrow has dragged out her British accent like a magician displaying a signature trick -- but hey, it's a great trick. Eckhart -- a favorite of LaBute -- shows considerable charm as his character is slowly drawn into emotional territory that scares him to death. Ehle is remarkable; hopefully, her startling resemblance to Streep will not hinder her career. Northam is the only main player that doesn't seem to ring completely true. He never seems comfortable in the poet's skin.

LaBute continues to defy being labeled in any way. He may be best known for the two films mentioned at the beginning of this review, but he also brought us the dark, hilarious comedy "Nurse Betty" in 2000. He's once again proven his versatility with "Possession."

In 'Possession' of Little Substance

Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart star in "Possession." (Focus)

By Eric Brace
Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, August 16, 2002; Page WE50

THAT LUNKY square-jawed American didn't really just ask that uptight British hottie, "Why do you always tie your hair up like that?" Did he?

In "Possession," the film adaptation of A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning 1990 novel, what's supposed to be a deep examination of the transcendence of love and art and poetry turns into another shallow film about how repressed the British are. Hasn't director and co-screenwriter Neil LaBute heard how hip and wild England is these days, "Cool Britannia" and all that?

The kicker, of course, is that the Brit gal is American actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who reprises her not-quite-convincing-enough British accent of "Shakespeare in Love" and "Sliding Doors."

Paltrow plays academic Maud Bailey, "thrice removed" cousin of (fictional) Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle) and an expert on LaMotte's life. The American hunk is researcher Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) who's looking into the minutiae of (fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam). He uncovers passionate letters that Ash (the queen's poet laureate) apparently wrote to LaMotte, but the paths of those two poets never crossed! Or did they? Bailey and Michell play Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy in connecting the dots to prove (or disprove) that the always-faithful-to-his-wife Ash never strayed, and certainly not with the lesbian LaMotte.

Complete with kiddie mystery staples of wind-swept Yorkshire coastlines, musty attics, seances and gravedigging, the plot unfolds in a sequence of convenient discoveries that serve to finally complete the picture for Bailey and Michell. But will they solve the puzzle that will make their scholarly reputations before fellow academics Morton Cropper (an obnoxious American, played by Trevor Eve, whose answer to everything is the almighty dollar), and Fergus Wolff (an on-the-way-out paramour of Bailey's who wears -- ugh! -- turtlenecks and is played by Toby Stephens).

Paralleling this dull adventure is the Ash/LaMotte romance, which builds from epistolary to physical during the film's best moments. Their scenes play like Pre-Raphaelite paintings come to life, and as LaMotte finally -- literally -- lets down her hair, you hope there will be at least as much erotic tension when Paltrow's Bailey inevitably does the same.

You can't help feeling sorry for these characters for having to inhabit such stereotypes. Is Michell's scruffy non-beard and bed-head hair so important that he can never find a blade or a comb? Are Brits all sexually repressed? Are all French people snotty and unhelpful? Are lesbians all clingy harpies? Are American men all boors with Kirk Douglas chins?

At least in Byatt's novel, she had some 600 pages to give them some gray shadings, but here they're mere caricatures that serve the director's main question: Will ice princess Paltrow get jiggy with the burly Yank?

James Berardinelli Reelviews

Possession

A Film Review by James Berardinelli

*** [3 out of 4 stars]

Possession shows the softer side of director Neil LaBute, the man responsible for a trio of dark, cynical films about human interaction: In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, and Nurse Betty. This time, LaBute has elected to try something more life-affirming. Adapting the novel by A.S. Byatt, he has fashioned a cleverly constructed motion picture that switches back and forth between the mid-19th century and the present in chronicling two disconnected love stories.

Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an American researcher who has come to London to further his investigations into the life of his favorite author, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), who once served as Queen Victoria's poet laureate. After discovering two previously unknown letters, Michell believes that Ash may have had contact with an obscure female poet named Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). This discovery leads him to collaborate with England's foremost authority on Christabel, Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is initially unimpressed by Michell's findings. However, as the two begin to delve more deeply into the potential Christabel/Ash connection, they learn that not only did the two know each other, but they may have been lovers. And, as they unravel the story of Christabel and Ash's relationship, Michell and Maud find their own interaction becoming increasingly intimate.

Neither romance in Possession represents a timeless love story (one could argue there's not enough tear-inducing melodrama for that), but, in large part because of credible performances and LaBute's workmanlike helmsmanship, we come to care about the characters and their interactions. The relationships of the two couples are very different, even though one would not exist without the other. Ash and Christabel have a short-lived, fiery affair, preceded by a long period of written correspondence and succeeded by a series of personal tragedies. Michell and Maud are attracted to each other almost from the beginning, but both have erected heavy emotional barriers that have to be overcome, and their mutual fear of commitment nearly prevents them from getting together at all. Nevertheless, the more they learn about the connection between the 19th century lovers, the more they become open to possibilities that neither has been previously equipped to deal with. For a while, the progression of their relationship echoes the discoveries they unearth about Ash and Christabel.

Possession is two parts romance and one part mystery. A subplot involving a conniving Ash biographer trying to trump Michell and Maud doesn't work, but it doesn't consume enough screen time to be more than a minor irritant. One of the real triumphs of the movie is the manner in which LaBute transitions from the present to the past (and back again). Often, this requires nothing more than the pan of a camera to span 140 years. The approach is simple, elegant, and effective. Most importantly, LaBute brings a sense of balance to the story. We are as interested in the Christabel/Ash pairing as we are in the Michell/Maud one, so we don't find ourselves becoming impatient when the canvas switches from one to the other. (The present-day lovers get more screen time, primarily because the burden of investigating the past - a cultural exhumation - consumes minutes.)

Aaron Eckhart returns for his fourth outing with LaBute to give a relaxed, confident portrayal of Michell. Cool, calm, and elegant, Gwyneth Paltrow is afforded another opportunity to use her flawless English accent. These two don't strike sparks, but there is a palpable chemistry. As Ash, Jeremy Northam, who is no stranger to period pieces, gets a chance to give a more emotional, less restrained performance than what we're used to. Jennifer Ehle, best known for her stage work and her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennett in the mid-'90s Pride and Prejudice mini-series, presents Christabel as a woman of both great strength and great vulnerability.

Although LaBute goes to some lengths to emphasize the connections between the two love stories, he also stylistically italicizes the differences. It's interesting to note that the present-day romance is developed primarily through words while the past-tense one is defined though gestures and images (Northam and Ehle don't have many lines). Yet the words of those two poets, written more than 100 years earlier, resonate with the man and woman investigating their liaison. Possession is compelling material, especially for those who believe that the lives and loves of the dead can impact the trajectory of the existences of the living.

© 2002 James Berardinelli

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Possession

Grade: B

Verdict: Not "possessed" enough, despite its talented director and cast.

Review: Neil LaBute's new movie, "Possession," starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, oddly echoes "The French Lieutenant's Woman," Karel Reitz's 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Both are based on popular prize-winning novels that are similarly resistant to the transition from page to screen. Both have prestigious casts. Both face the challenge of integrating a modern love story and a historical one. Both feature fine performances, sensitive direction and gorgeous countryside.

And both are honorable failures. "Possession" is certainly worth seeing -- it's the class act to close the summer -- but the film misses some crucial charge, an innate energy that was in the book that didn't translate to the movie. You could call it genteel. You could also call it too restrained.

The picture, like A.S. Byatt's intricate novel, is a romance wrapped inside a literary mystery. In present-day England, two scholars (Paltrow and Eckhart), become obsessed with finding out what -- if anything -- happened more than a century ago between Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), Queen Victoria's poet laureate, and Christobel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), a lesser-known poet whose feminist themes have made her big in women's studies. (Both characters are fictional creations of Byatt's.)

Eckhart, LaBute's leading man of choice, plays Roland Michell, a cocky American studying in London and working as a research assistant to an esteemed professor who's an expert on Ash. Sounds glamorous, but Roland mostly spends his days combing through index cards, looking for how many gooseberry jams Ash gave his wife in 1850. "This is not a job for a grown-up," he mutters.

Then, by accident, he discovers several letters hidden in the back pages of a book. They appear to be love letters sent by Ash to LaMotte; but an essential part of the Ash legend is that he was famously faithful to his wife. If the letters are authentic, Roland will become a sensation in academic circles.

Roland seeks out Maud Bailey (Paltrow), a brilliant but aloof academic who specializes in La Motte. At first, she thinks the possibility of an affair between the two is preposterous. That LaMotte was such an unconventional Victorian woman -- no men, no children and fully committed to another woman -- is essential to understanding her poetry. But Maud is hooked in spite of herself. Joining Roland in his sleuthing, the two trace the footsteps of these unlikely secret lovers all over England and even to Europe.

To that end, the movie shifts back and forth between the present-day literary detectives and the poets' troubled romance. If they are discovered, it would create a scandal. But they are irresistibly drawn to each other, by a passion for words as much as a sexual passion. In one of her early letters, LaMotte writes, "I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best part of me."

At times, the past/present parallels work beautifully. The movie reminds us how the past is always present. You get a slight tingle when LaBute cuts between the two couples standing next to the same waterfall. He also captures the drizzly romanticism of the English countryside, with its drenched green fields and imposing mansions. Finally, his interest in and acute understanding of matters of gender, laid out so expertly in his first film, "In the Company of Men," makes him an especially good fit for this material.

What LaBute can't do is communicate the sheer sexiness of pursuing esoteric academic minutiae. Byatt could do it, because words are what she has. But LaBute not only must invent a visual correlative, but he also has to find some way to give the characters' infatuation with language a dimensionality. He pulls it off as well as anyone possibly could, but it's something of an unattainable goal.

Paltrow's familiar greyhound elegance and fragile reserve make her perfect casting for Maud, a woman who's allowed her studies to cut her off from life. And Elkhart is a revelation. Typically cast by LaBute as an unfeeling brute or nasty conniver, he makes a wonderful romantic hero, even if his two-day beard makes him look like the last five Tom Cruise magazine covers.

The other lovers fare less well. Northam is one of the best actors working -- remember him in "Emma" with Paltrow? But he projects a certain rationality. He's doesn't bring the unfettered impetuousness that Ralph Fiennes (rumored as an early choice) might have.

Ehle is a far bigger problem. Again, she's good enough, but her line readings are nothing special and she's given too many scenes where she just stands there, smiling enigmatically. It probably doesn't help that her broad brow, distinctive nose and slightly hooded eyes suggest Streep. (Ehle even walks along a sea wall in a hooded cape, as Streep did in "The French Lieutenant's Woman.")

LaBute deserves a lot of credit for attempting something as unabashedly and sincerely romantic as "Possession." There's not a hint of his trademark misanthropy here, and his own mad crush on words (so evident in his plays and screenplays) is perfectly attuned to Byatt's book. "Possession" is definitely worth checking out, if only for a respite from the tumult of so many other summer movies. But it's not -- and I don't think this is a Victorian term -- the slam-dunk we expected.

-- Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Box Office Magazine

POSSESSION

*** [3 stars out of 4]

Director Neil LaBute, who gained notoriety with his scathing critiques of the relationships between men and women in "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors," takes a 180-degree turn with "Possession," a bona fide romance about two pairs of lovers, one in modern-day London, the other from the Victorian era. What LaBute has retained is his acute depiction of a complicated couple. What he has lost is the full realization of their relationship.

Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is a brash American with a fellowship to study Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam). In his research, Roland stumbles upon a love letter by Ash, written not to his wife, whom he unabashedly adored, but to fellow poet Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). That Ash and LaMotte not only would have corresponded but would have been lovers is a profound discovery that would garner Roland respect among his stodgy colleagues.

For corroboration, Roland consults Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a brilliant, if cold, English academic who has dedicated her life to the study of LaMotte, a feminist and lesbian whom Maud admires for her forward-thinking. Together, they uncover a paper trail that proves Roland's theory--and fall in love themselves along the way.

LaBute and his co-writers David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones, adapting the novel by A.S. Byatt, demonstrate a true love for the written word, scripting long (too long) dialogue exchanges in which Maud and Roland read to each other the love letters that they have uncovered, seemingly in their entirety, before the scene segues to Ash and LaMotte. Indeed, one pines for such paper trails in an age when most communication takes place in the ether.

The performances across the board are predictably solid, given the talent involved. Ehle in particular is at once cherubic and mature, clever and cultured, selfish and sacrificing.

Of the two relationships, Maud and Roland's is the more intriguing. A feminist who has been criticized by her girlfriends for her pretty blonde hair, Maud maintains a distance from Roland even while she is drawn to him, afraid of sacrificing her independence and her strength. Roland is a modern man and understands her hesitation but still is red-blooded and frustrated. Unfortunately, these complexities are unsatisfactorily resolved. Neither is Ash and LaMotte's relationship conventional, but at least they experience some sort of closure.

-Annlee Ellingson

The Movie Chicks

by Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone

POSSESSION

RATING 3.5 [out of 5]

©2002 - FOCUS FEATURES - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

(Director: Neil LaBute, 102 min)

Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an American in London to study the works of the great Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam). Roland stumbles across a love letter that was not written to his wife, the supposed inspiration for all his poetry, but to some other woman he obviously adored. Roland approaches Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a literary researcher, for help in discovering the identity of the woman - Roland believes her to be another poet, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). They aren't the only ones trying to solve this mystery; Professor Cropper (Trevor Eve) and Fergus Wolff (Toby Stephens) get word of the letter and will do anything to be the first to get their hands on actual proof of the scandal.

Roland and Maud find a whole set of love letters written by the poets and from diaries they discover the secret rendezvous locations of Ash and LaMotte. (The romance between the poets is shown in flashback sequences.) As Roland and Maud trace the footsteps of the lovers from another time, they begin to feel the passion themselves.

The movie switches easily from the Victorian era to modern times and the technique works well here, especially when the two couples are in the same room a century apart. The nice thing is that both stories are interesting (the past and the present), and you don't mind switching from one to the other because you want to know what happens next in both of them.

This may seem like a movie that only works well for hopeless romantics or lovers of poetry and fine literature, but it's also a smart movie with two people trying to solve a mystery. There's humor and beautiful English countryside, and two drop-dead gorgeous guys being gallant. Who knew poetry geeks and research assistants could be so good looking? Ok, they probably aren't all like this, but one can dream.

Cozzi Fan Tutti Celluloid Musings

Possession

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have access to more means of communication than ever before. Our telephones follow us everywhere. The Internet has made it possible for people to have friends, lovers, and business associates that they've never met. A would-be writer like Your Humble Critic can reach a worldwide audience. Words travel like lightning over broadband lines, punctuated by acronyms and emoticons: IMHO, RROFLMAO, IMHO...we send words in one-zero bits, and yet we actually say very little.

Imagine a world in which the only way to communicate with others is either face-to-face or by means of letters; letters not typed hurriedly and then sent via pressing a key, but painstakingly hand-written using pens dipped in ink bottles; in which people say things like "They say that women change. 'tis so, but you are ever constant" and "I am a creature of my pen; my pen is the best part of me." and "I shan't forget that first glimpse of your form; illuiminated as it was by flashes of lightning" and "Did we not -- did you not flame, and I catch fire?".Imagine a world before Freud and Deepak Chopra and Oprah and Dr. Phil, in which language illustrates the life of the heart, in which people feel their emotions and passions rather than analyze them to death.

Such is the world revealed in the correspondence between the (fictional, so don't bother consulting Bartlett's) Victorian poet laureate Randolph Henry Ash and feminist writer Christabel LaMotte in Neil LaBute's lush and completely out of character romance film POSSESSION. Ash, a loose amalgam of William Butler Yeats and Robert Browning, is reputed to have been completely devoted to his wife. While researching Ash for an exhibit at the London Museum, Roland Michell (LaBute repertory company stalwart Aaron Eckhart), a museum research assistant, stumbles upon two letters tucked into a book that appear to be passionate letters written by Ash to a woman obviously not his wife.

Intrigued by this potentially explosive discovery, Michell enlists the help of Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a clipped, businesslike, obviously emotionally wounded academic who teaches women's studies, and who it turns out, is distantly related to LaMotte. Together the pair, as if Nancy Drew had teamed up with the cuter of the Hardy Boys, embark on a quest to discover the truth about Ash and LaMotte's relationship, discovering an attraction to each other along the way (and a somewhat nefarious and quite gratuitous subplot).

On first glance, this kind of lushly romantic parallel story, based on A.S. Byatt's 1990 novel and bearing more than a passing resemblance to John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and Karel Reisz 's 1982 film version, would seem to be unlikely territory for LaBute, whose usual milieu is how the relations between men and women often destroy both. Indeed, at times the screenplay, co-written by LaBute along with David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones, reflects Bute's customary worldview, as when Maud cries in frustration after the discovery of how a series of misunderstandings caused a permanent rift between the 19th century lovers, "We're all doomed to just tear each other apart." And yet instead of LaBute's trademark cynicism, POSSESSION, for all its resemblance at times to the more sour entries in the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre, allows, in the unlikely personage of Aaron Eckhart's character, a scintilla of optimism.

POSSESSION is gorgeously shot by Jean Yves Escoffier in some of the most spectacular locations in the Yorkshire countryside. The Victorian scenes have a lush, sensual pre-Raphaelite look, with warm lighting, lace curtains, and lush green rolling hills. The contemporary story settings are more urban and angular, with neutral shades providing the overall effect. These themes are also carried into the costuming and even the performances. Jeremy Northam sports a billowy poet shirt and a wavy, wild coiffure that makes him look like Heathcliff by way of Alan Rickman. He smolders his passion through his eyes. Aaron Eckhart, who here bears an astonishing and sometimes distracting resemblance to the Harrison Ford of twenty years ago, is all angles, stubble, and scruffiness. Jennifer Ehle as Christabel wears a series of lush velvety gowns that resemble a Victorian Renaissance Faire look rather than the tightly corseted and bustled gowns we associate with the Victorian era. Where Ehle is soft and fleshy and glowing, Gwyneth Paltrow is stiff, brittle, and angular in severe black, white and gray clothing.

Someone is obviously trying mightily to sell Gwyneth Paltrow as the Second Coming of Audrey Hepburn, but the resemblance ends at the similar clotheshorse figure. Hepburn had a warm glow underneath the elegant fashions, but while Paltrow does a decent approximation of an upper class twit British accent, she seem to somehow able to garner acclaim merely by standing around sulking but looking great in clothes. Maud is certainly , as her sometime suitor Fergus (Toby Stephens) says, "a bit of a ball buster," but while Jennifer Ehle's luminous Christabel is able to answer a remark such as Ash's "You cut me, Madam" with "I only meant to scratch," Maud's idea of witty repartee is "I suppose I can put up with you for an evening." The problem is that while Paltrow certainly does a reasonably decent job of portraying angry and wounded, there's no sense that all this pain is merely covering up for a poetic soul. There is no way I will ever believe that when the country in which this film is set contains the likes of Kate Winslet, Gina McKee, and even Rachel Weisz, Gwyneth Paltrow is the best they could do.

If the contemporary story has any credibility whatsoever, it's due to a breakthrough performance by Aaron Eckhart. Eckhart until this point has been Neil LaBute's unlikely and somewhat twisted muse, and this is a complete break from the parade of scumbags he's portrayed in the director's previous films. This is the kind of charming rogue role that Harrison Ford would have walked away with twenty years ago, and while this kind of character usually exists just to display the female character in the way males in classical ballet do, the emotional center of the contemporary rests on Eckhart's admittedly hunky shoulders, and he balances it perfectly. While initially, Roland seems to be one of those broad-brush American characters we see all too often in British productions, his relentless pursuit of his quest renders him a kind of Indiana Jones-style adventurer. This swashbuckle he brings to the role ultimately overrides the suspension of disbelief required initially of the viewer, that this guy who looks like he should be the Hunky All-American Dude on Survivor 5, this guy whose clunky idea of a romantic statement is "I want to see if there's an us in you and me", is a scholar of Victorian literature.

POSSESSION forces us to ask ourselves: Are we really better off now that we are so relentlessly rational? Now that instead of slowly unlacing corsets (and don't tell anyone, but Victorian corsets had hooks in the front that makes the painstaking unlacing that takes place in period pictures unnecessary), we merely pull sweaters over our heads; now that we know everything there is to know about sex, do we really know any mjore about sexuality? About desire? About what it is that makes people come together? And do we really suffer any less pain as a result, or just a different kind?

These are some heavy questions for a summer release to ponder, and POSSESSION does so in a way that taps into both the emotions and the intellect, wrapped in a beautifuly decorated package.

- Jill Cozzi

Spirituality & Health

Movie Review

by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Possession

There is a deep part of us that is enthralled with stories about great yearning -- whether the subject is lovers caught up in their passions, explorers mapping new territories, or men and women sacrificing everything for their dreams. Possession is a fascinating screen adaptation of A. S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel that is both a literary detective story set in modern-day London and a parallel romantic drama set in the Victorian era.

Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an American research assistant at the British Museum who is intrigued by the work of Victorian Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), Queen Victoria's poet laureate. By sheer luck, he discovers two love letters from this married man to Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), a lesser-known poet. He immediately contacts Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a gender studies academic who is a relative of LaMotte's and maintains her archives. She has always believed that this proto-feminist was in love with her housemate, Blanche Glover (Lena Headey). Roland and Maud decide to find out more about the secret affair between Ash and LaMotte. At her home, they find another cache of letters and then take off to Yorkshire where the two lovers had a four-week tryst many years ago.

Neil LaBute (Nurse Betty) directs this romantic drama which skips back and forth between the Victorian era and the present. Jennifer Ehle, who was so mesmerizing in Istvan Szabo's Sunshine, steals the movie with her incandescent performance as Christabel. The grand passion that leads Ash to stray from his marriage has a palpable reality whereas the intimacy that blooms between Roland and Maud is hobbled by their fears, doubts, and emotional immaturity. For the Victorians, yearning is a fire that consumes them whereas for the modern couple, it is a sputtering flame emitting little light. The sublime poetry used by Ash and Christabel to describe their transports of love is light years away from the contorted and cliched language used by Roland and Maud to get at what they are feeling.

Nonetheless, this ambitious film about yearning does register on the senses and, like the screen version of The French Lieutenant's Woman, it offers some interesting insights into sexual politics in different eras. LaBute and co-screenplay writers David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones make it clear that in matters of the heart it is always best to not to be swayed by the rigors of reason or the complicated meanderings of the mind.

Palo Alto Weekly

A review of "Possession" by Jeanne Aufmuth

Stars: *** [out of 4]

Director Neil LaBute ("In the Company of Men", "Nurse Betty") sidesteps his well-developed dark side and embraces romantic mystery with accomplished aplomb. Reciprocated romance has never felt so arch, or so uncontrollably delicious.

"A" for the effort behind this complicated adaptation of A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning 1990 novel of the same name. LaBute muse Aaron Eckhart plays the ultimate fish-out-of-water, a rogue American literary scholar (Roland Michell) surrounded by snotty English academics. With genuine Yankee perseverance, Michell doggedly pursues an unsubstantiated theory involving his fellowship subject, Randolph Henry Ash, legendary poet laureate to Queen Victoria.

Michell's industrious search leads him to the doorstep of brilliant and staid English scholar Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a descendant of Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte and a tireless researcher of her ancestor's life and work. Michell claims that Ash and LaMotte (played in glorious repetitive flashback by Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle) were lovers, a conjecture that meets with raised eyebrows and classic English disdain. When Michell and Bailey discover a hidden cache of fervent love letters, their speculative notion is blown wide open.

Were this simply a movie mystery, it would be a satisfying cinematic treat. But the narrative-weaving literary quest is layered with passion so ripe it nearly erupts. Ash and LaMotte smolder under a spell of physical chemistry that exudes illicit sensuality. The heat of their written words ("I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you") is equally palpable. Northam's burgeoning attraction to his lady love is a barely controlled tempest of emotion, and Ehle astonishes as a volatile artist torn between two lovers. The heady combination of the intellectual and the physical is a potent plot influence.

The weak link lies within the contemporary parallel romance of Michell and Bailey. Eckhart (hot hot hot) steams up the screen with sinfully masculine spirit, but Paltrow's stodgy ice princess kills the modern-day mood before she thaws, at long last.

Delectable romantic escapism is good for the soul. Kudos to LaBute for setting off on an improbable journey of excessive sentimentality. The tang of jealousy and obsession overshadows small, shallow plot contrivances.

"No mere human can stand near a fire and not be consumed". Yes indeed.

Newsday

In One Era and Out the Other

By John Anderson
STAFF WRITER

August 16, 2002

POSSESSION (PG-13)

** [2 out of 4 stars]

A pair of academics in the here and now try to figure out who loved whom in the there and then, as parallel romances erupt in Victorian and modern England. Skeletal, unconvincing and guaranteed to tick off fans of the book. With Aaron Eckhart, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle, Lena Headey. Screenplay by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and Neil LaBute, based on the novel by A.S. Byatt. Directed by Neil LaBute. 1:42 (language, adult situations). At area theaters.

A film about poetry and containing very little of it, "Possession" is one of those movies adapted from a beloved novel whose fans can't believe it's been brought to the screen. They turn out to be right.

A movie needn't be a clone of its book, of course, but someone should have realized that A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning "Possession" of 1990 was a particularly knotty and nuanced narrative to meet the boiled-down requirements of big-budget filmmaking - even if it was coming equipped with Gwyneth Paltrow's English accent. (Someone should tell Paltrow that, a la Streep, accent isn't supposed to replace performance.) To what should be no one's surprise, there's a bewildering sense of compression marking this story of parallel love affairs - between a literary researcher and a feminist scholar now, and a celebrated Romantic poet and feminist icon then. The result is, you don't believe a thing.

Part of the problem is the movie's snide attitude: Should a story with literary scholarship as its engine make intellectual endeavor in general - and academia in particular - seem so petty, trite and as rich in human warmth as "Glengarry Glen Ross"?

Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an American researcher enjoying a literary fellowship at a prestigious London university (we don't know the school, but we know the city, thanks to a double-decker bus and a red phone booth). It's hard to say who's more abused, Roland by the British or the audience by the dialogue. "Oh," sniffs one officious functionary, "you're that American who's over here." No, he's an Aleut on 'oliday in Fiji. Who talks like this?

Lots of people, at least in director-writer Neil LaBute's incarnation of not-so-merry-olde England, where Roland proceeds to validate all the anti- American biases he encounters - in one case, by the rather casual theft of original letters by the celebrated Romantic versifier Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), which the Browning-esque Ash apparently left reposing in a book at the British Museum, waiting for the likes of Roland to come along and steal them. After 100 years of literary research. Uh-huh.

"Possession" isn't film noir, but what the heck: Enter the blonde. It's a joke in its way, but the most irritatingly arrogant English person Roland meets is played by Paltrow: Maud Bailey, an authority on another Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), and the very unwelcoming colleague Roland seeks out to help substantiate his theory that Ash and LaMotte were romantically, and Romantically, linked - or, as someone puts it, had a "Dark Lady of the Sonnets thing." No one before has suspected that the two were even acquainted, much less that LaMotte was the subject of Ash's celebrated love poems (see Browning). Maud scoffs, then promptly melts.

"Possession" is, in the end, silly. LaBute, whose previous efforts ("In the Company of Men," "Your Friends and Neighbors," "Nurse Betty") were caustic takes on very contemporary mores and anxieties, turns out, oddly, not to be the director to make a half costume drama, and his efforts to re-create the Victorian era are really efforts to re-create our cinematic impressions of the Victorian era; when Jennifer Ehle's cowled head appears in the window of a horse-drawn carriage, it's a direct steal from "The French Lieutenant's Woman," and that's the least of it. Ehle is, as usual, a delightful presence, but her Christina continually eyes Ash with what can only be interpreted as indulgent tolerance. Or was she looking at her director?

The Journal News
(Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York)

Possession

Bottom Line: A-

Reviewed by MARSHALL FINE
THE JOURNAL NEWS

Paltrow stars in beguilingly romantic film

Original publication: 08/15/02

Biography is an imprecise art, as much about the biographer as about his subject. But biography is only one small part of Neil LaBute's "Possession," a beguilingly romantic new film based on the novel by A.S. Byatt. This literary detective story is about several things at once, including the inability to say what one truly means and the consequences thereof.

LaBute, whose credited co-writers include Laura Jones and David Henry Hwang, seems an unlikely choice for this material. In his own self-written films, "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors," LaBute has staked out the snaky territory of contemporary relationships as fertile ground for unsettling drama.

"Possession," by contrast, is about less self-involved characters. Though he's altered Byatt's story slightly, he understands the dynamics of these relationships and doesn't impose his own acidic viewpoint on them.

The film tells parallel stories that both refract and reflect each other. The central story deals with a pair of academics in contemporary England. Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an American scholar in England, studying the work of poet Randolph Ash, once the poet laureate to Queen Victoria. While working for a self-absorbed academic, Roland comes across some previously undiscovered letters -- love letters -- that seem to have been written to someone other than Ash's wife, though there is no record of his having had a fling.

A little research puts him on the trail of a female poet who was a contemporary of Ash, Christabel LaMotte. Roland then seeks out England's leading authority of LaMotte, a professor of gender studies named Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow). Maud, a stand-offish type, initially pooh-poohs the notion that Ash and LaMotte might have been lovers. LaMotte, after all, is a feminist hero, a lesbian poet who bucked societal norms of the time by remaining unmarried and living with a painter named Blanche Glover.

But a trip to the aging estate where LaMotte ended her days, now owned by LaMotte descendants, unearths more clues and hints -- enough to convince the icy Maud and the eager Roland that they are on to something.

Even as Maud and Roland follow what may be only an imaginary trail, LaBute takes the story back to the 19th century, offering the story of LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle) and Ash (Jeremy Northam) in the kind of detail their biographers can never know. Their affair, in fact, was very real, if short-lived, because Ash was both famous and married. But it carries implications that ripple into the present, in ways that Maud and Roland only begin to suspect.

LaBute beautifully contrasts the passion of the past with the academic distance of the present. LaMotte and Ash are both artists, whose souls seem to reach out to each other, despite the societal strictures of the time. Maud and Roland, on the other hand, can only imagine that kind of feeling; they are much too modern to let their hearts guide them, preferring to rely on intellect, a dry substitute at best.

But, almost as if sending a message or an impulse across time, the feelings between LaMotte and Ash gradually wear down the contemporary defenses both of these academics have built around their emotions: "No mere human can stand in fire and not be consumed," as LaMotte and Ash observe, a notion that seems to reach the modern characters. As the scholars dig deeper into this mystery, they get an inkling of the depth of a relationship they can only study from afar -- and begin to notice that they, too, have feelings for each other that they will not allow themselves to act upon.

LaBute films the contemporary sequences with a crisp, cool style, even as he gives the scenes from the past a candlelit warmth. Gradually, he softens the modern scenes as the emotions of the past begin to bleed into the present.

Eckhart, something of a muse for LaBute, is an intriguing academic: Though obviously knowledgeable and a scholar, he has a bristling American energy that sets him apart from his British counterparts. Eckhart, a visceral type, finds this character's intellectual rigor, but also his physicality and an emotional reserve that is touching.

Paltrow is the perfect counterpoint: disciplined, self-contained, almost icy (though she looks awfully tan for a British scholar). But she subtly reveals just how much of this is a defense mechanism against what obviously are painful relationships from the past.

As Ash and LaMotte, Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle both understand the society that made this relationship seem impossible and the unspoken ways in which passion was expressed. When they get to act upon it, they set the screen afire.

LaBute has been less successful in transferring the weakest part of Byatt's novel to the screen: the section of the contemporary detective story involving competing academics with a proprietary interest in Ash. It seemed like a mere plot device in the novel and like an afterthought in this film.

Still, "Possession" is heady stuff, a film that refuses to dumb itself down and expects its audience to keep up. LaBute has made the summer's smartest movie, a captivating excursion in which a fascination with literary academia spawns a lushly romantic tale that's impossible to resist.

Possession

08/15/2002

By GARY COGILL / WFAA-TV

Possession is an intelligent, well-acted film from Neil LaBute, who directed Nurse Betty and In the Company of Men. Gwyneth Paltrow plays a stuffy British literary scholar who meets a free-thinking American literary scholar, played by Aaron Eckhart.

Together they research a Victorian romance, which the film travels back in time to dramatize. Possession takes a little work on the part of the audience, but the rewards are quite satisfying as the modern day researches become romantically intertwined in their studies.

I like Possession because it's an unusual, well-told story.

Possession (2002)

movie review by John Esther, Pasadena Weekly

Slouching toward Hollywood--LaBute losing 'Possession' of himself

What is happening to Neil LaBute? His career commenced with two highly controversial films of varying worth, sophistication, contention and mention.

First was the darkly told brutal assault on a woman via the incision of relationships between men competing for power with "In the Company of Men." Then came his darker exploration of relationships, irking more than a few people in the process, with "Your Friends & Neighbors."

Both of these films explored sexual politics in contemporary America under latter day capitalism. Sometimes misguided, they were unremittingly unsentimental and provocative. Few films caused a wider debate in quarters not necessarily prone to consider cinema beyond popcorn and escapism.

Having caused a stir, Hollywood gobbled LaBute, or "La Brute," and allowed him to direct someone else's script, the John C. Richards and James Flamberg "Nurse Betty," starring Renee Zellweger as the title character with Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, and Greg Kinnear supporting.

A violent piece of mishmash, "Nurse Betty" failed to say something about identification and escapism through moving image voyeurism, despite its pretensions.

His newest film, "Possession," based on the Booker Prize novel by A.S. Byatt is a bigger failure.

Considering Byatt's elegiac prose, wordplay and sexual and gender politics, "Possession" would be a tough task for anyone to translate to the screen. Hiring "M. Butterfly" author David Henry Hwang, along with Laura Jones, whom has a history of adapting known literary works for the screen, once with success ("The Portrait of a Lady") more mediocrity ("Oscar and Lucinda," "An Angel at My Table') and failure ("Angela's Ashes," "A Thousand Acres") to help LaBute did not help

Whoever's fault it is, the translation to the screen flopped. One of the biggest faults was the stripping of Byatt's sexual politics. Politics one would assume LaBute would be poised to produce. Instead the politics are stripped to a minimum, leaving little amusement beside two love stories coupling each other.

Roland (Aaron Eckhart) the American comes to "our favorite colony," England, to do some academic research. In the library he discovers the private letters of famed poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam). The letters indicate he may have had a liaison with Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). The discovery, which certainly would have been a scandal to Victorian England and Ash's wife, Ellen (Holly Aird), would make all sorts of tumultuous headways in a country still, barely, concerned with the lives of poets.

After confiscating the property "like an American," this raider acquires the help of Dr. Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a staunch feminist with a composure that makes Margaret Thatcher look like Cheri Oteri, knows Victorian literature and is "thrice removed" from the infamous couple.

As the melodramatic barriers between Maud and Roland crumble toward lovey-dovey so does the once elusive romance between Christabel and Randolph.

Yes, they were lovers in a society that was the incredulous epitome of domestic sanctity. Not only was Christabel fornicating with a married man--after a ludicrously elongated formality of courtship--she was having a lesbian affair with Blanche (Lena Headey). Was this because there were no men around in Christabel's life so she settled for a woman whom she then gave up a real man came along?

The secrecies of the affair fold quickly for Maud and Roland, but not as quickly as they do for the audience, who is the omniscient voyeur in the entanglements of love present and past.

The story is actually interesting and well done, if you can ignore the direction of LaBute, which performs as a travel commercial for Britain, for the first two-thirds of the film, before crumbling into a mawkish state that will exasperate LaBute followers.

Maud is cold, becoming colder as she starts to fall for a man. Roland has had his share of affairs and does not want to ruin the life of another woman. In one confrontational scene, Maud asks why should anyone fall in love if all it will do is end in grief? It is a staggering and poignant moment about couples in a world that know longer obeys Victorian decorum but is, for these two educated adults, who are intellectually aware of the oppressive madness and loss that love brings their instincts protect themselves from "being burned by their own fire."

But even this couple cannot help but succumb to love's oppression. Considering Maud's cantankerous attitude, I say, "good luck" to Roland.

But the film's most derelict aspect is the unraveling of a big secret, which the audience learns was not a real secret, thus stripping their narrative of tragedy. Christabel may feel uncertain for her great misleading deed, trying to cleanse her guilt during Robert's last mortal minutes (Gee, thanks a lot). But we the audience ascertain Robert knew the secret all along.

It is an ending one could hardly imagine the unsentimental LaBute would have told before he slouched into the timid storytelling world of Hollywood.

Michael Dequina, MR. BROWN'S MOVIES

Possession (PG-13)

*** 1/2 [1 1/2 stars out of 4]

Given his twisted track record, one could plausibly be led to believe that Neil LaBute's Possession is a remake of the freaky (in more ways than one) 1981 Euro-horror-art film in which Isabelle Adjani did the nasty with an octopus-like creature. Alas, the only halfway subversive move LaBute makes in this film is cast his regular, slimeball/eccentric specialist Aaron Eckhart, as someone neither a slimeball nor an eccentric--nor, for that matter, a combination of the two.

Eckhart plays a traditional romantic leading man this time around, and that should give one clear indication as to just how far removed Possession is from the rest of the LaBute oeuvre. His last film, Nurse Betty, may have been considerably lighter on its feet than the cinematic cynicism of his In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, but it still operated within a darkly comic milieu. In adapting A.S. Byatt's novel of the same name, LaBute is definitely making a stretch--and, sadly, the strain shows.

No such strain befalls Eckhart, however, who proves more than up to the sensitive, swoony task as Roland Michell, an American scholar in England studying the life and work of Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam). When he stumbles upon some secret love letters that appear to have been exchanged between Ash and another poet of the era, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), he joins forces with Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), an English academic who is researching LaMotte, to investigate the truth.

No prizes for anyone able to figure out what happens between Roland and Maud, and despite Eckhart's charismatic and sensitive turn, the modern-day end of this two-pronged romance never quite comes to life. Maud is supposed to be no-nonsense and remote, but Paltrow lays on the ice a bit too thick, and the eventual thaw comes off less than convincing. More involving is the flashback story; Northam and Ehle do strike the requisite sparks, and Lena Headey gives an equally passionate supporting turn as LaMotte's companion.

Overall, though, the tone and feel of Possession is more reflective of the more distant modern-day storyline. There's no denying the sincerity of the entire enterprise, and LaBute exercises remarkable restraint, never resorting to melodramatic manipulation. But it's possible to be too restrained, and that's how Possession ultimately comes off as: so restrained as to be detached and almost as chilly as his darker films--not exactly what one would want from a story about a love so strong that it echoes through the ages.

Website: The Man Who Viewed Too Much

Publication: Time Out New York

Review by Mike D'Angelo

Possession (Neil LaBute): 64

On paper, Possession simply should not work. It's a tender, delicate romance directed by a man heretofore known for lacerating portraits of strenuous narcissism and casual sadism. It's a superficial, stone-skip adaptation of one of the most fulsomely bibliophilic novels in recent memory, replete with more gravely ardent poetry and epistolary wooing than you'll find in a full semester of Intro to Victorian Lit. It's a movie that asks us to accept granite-jawed Aaron Eckhart and reed-waisted Gwyneth Paltrow as fusty academics, and politely requests that we not snicker when Paltrow's long blond tresses, which she wears in a severe bun for most of the picture, are inevitably loosened by desire. But like the bumblebee unconcerned by what the laws of aerodynamics allegedly dictate, Possession somehow manages to stay aloft all the same.

Perhaps it's merely a question of context. Stripped of A.S. Byatt's byzantine digressions and rococo wordplay, Possession can't help but seem trivial and facile compared to its source (which won the Booker Prize in 1990). Place the film version beside the average Hollywood romance, however, and it fairly shimmers with wit, intelligence and formal dexterity. LaBute, who also co-scripted with David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones, has changed Eckhart's character from a Brit to an American, but otherwise he remains largely faithful to the broad strokes of Byatt's narrative, in which two literary sleuths hesitantly fall for each other while retracing the steps of a pair of (fictitious) poets who'd had a clandestine affair more than a century earlier. As Roland (Eckhart) and Maud (Paltrow) visit the ground once trod -- and share the bed once rattled -- by Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), LaBute deftly cuts back and forth between the two liaisons, only one of which will end happily.

Whereas Byatt's lengthy novel teems with ideas, LaBute's movie, restricted to two hours, wisely confines itself to a single theme: the oddly moving juxtaposition of Ash and LaMotte's grand, articulate passion with Roland and Maud's modern neuroses and tongue-tied stabs at intimacy. ("Maud, I think that you are very...you know?" is about as eloquent as Roland gets.) In a society that offers few practical obstacles to romantic bliss, Possession suggests, lovers -- and writers -- are forced to construct dubious psychological ones instead. But the movie's true pleasures are more basic than that: sharp, knowing dialogue; appealing performances (if there's any justice, Eckhart's scruffy, laid-back magnetism will make him the new hunk du jour); structural symmetries; and the welcome recognition that the mind, too, can be an erogenous zone. Anybody who's ever been turned on by someone's use of an unfamiliar word will understand

Possession (2002)

movie review by Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Just as an exhibition of love poems by Queen Victoria's (fictional) notoriously faithful poet laureate, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam, "Gosford Park"), is about to open, American research assistant Roland Mitchell (Aaron Eckhart, "Erin Brockovich") finds original love letters by him to a woman not his wife. Further secret research leads him to icy English literary professor Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her life's subject, ancestor poetess Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle, "Sunshine"). The initially skeptical Maud is turned around by a discovery at LaMotte's home and the two team up to solve the mystery. But unbeknownst to them, another duplicitous team want the Ash/LaMotte correspondence in their "Possession."

Laura:

Adapted from A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize winning novel by director Neil LaBute ("Nurse Betty"), David Henry Hwang ("M. Butterfly") and Laura Jones ("The Portrait of a Lady"), "Possession" tries to cover too much groundtoo quickly. While the film is engaging, it doesn't acquire enough depth to make a lasting impression.

Roland, the American bull in an English china shop, is informed by colleague Fergus Wolfe (Toby Stephens) that Maud Baily is 'something of a ballbuster.' Maud treats Roland disdainfully when it's clear he didn't realize that Christabel had a lesbian lover, Blanche Glover (Lena Headey, "Twice Upon a Yesterday"). Something about the rough American intrigues Maud enough to allow him to stay over ('I'm a brush and flush kind of guy' he informs his hostess) and invite him to visit the ancestral home of LaMotte before his departure. This leads to another overnighter when Lord (Graham Crowden) and Lady Bailey (Anna Massey) are enchanted by the young couple. Seeing Christabel's room for the first time since childhood, Maud remembers mysterious lines from a poem that lead her to a secret stash of letters. Roland's theory is confirmed, but the mystery is deepened.

As a tentative romance is held at bay in the present, flashbacks to 1859 reveal the far more openly inflamed lovers of the past. A current literary mystery is slowly revealed as a tragically touching love affair born of equal literary intellect and passion. Layered atop all this roiling emotion is the scholarly hijinx of two teams trying to outscoop each other for fame and fortune.

The parallel love stories recall "The French Lieutenant's Woman" heightened by Ehle's strong resemblance to Meryl Streep and costuming in voluminous hooded cloaks. However, Ash's sympathies are gained too easily when we learn that his marriage is sexless while LaMotte's commitment to Blanche seems more like charity than romantic love. The present day romance is more interesting because what separates Roland and Maud - background, social standing and modern day neuroses - are more believable obstructions. LaBute has given his perennial leading man some snappy dialogue ('That's Freud - the other side of attraction is repulsion - or is that Calvin Klein?') that highlights his American otherness. LaBute is most successful, though, with his satirical look at scholarly politics. Having had a fellowship in Britain himself, the writer/director tweaks his subject matter with a knowing wink.

LaBute rushes through the mystery aspect of his story like a speeding train, with revelations coming so fast and furiously, the academics seem like dummies for not having uncovered everything sooner. Ehle and Northam are portrayed like story characters, reusing the same gazes to signify emotion, but the director gives Eckhart and Paltrow room enough to bring real emotion into their work. Director of Photography Jean Yves Escoffier ("Nurse Betty") and Production Designer Luciana Arrighi ("Howard's End") work in parallel so that scenes glide between eras with the opening of a door or a camera pan. Costume Designer Jenny Beavan ("Howard's End") contrasts Maud's cool, crisp elegance against Roland's scruffier nonchalance, while indulging in luxurious opulence for Christabel.

"Possession" weaves together two love stories, a mystery and a satire, but only two of its four strands take hold.

B-

Robin:
Robin did not see this film.

Jam! Movies

Friday, August 16, 2002

Two couples in two times

By LIZ BRAUN -- Toronto Sun

There's so much going on in Possession that it's not really fair to pigeonhole the film as a love story.

Based on Antonia Byatt's Booker-Award winning novel, Possession tells two parallel tales of risk and romance, one set in the present and one set in the past. The narrative involves history, poetry, the life of the mind and plenty of smouldering looks and heaving bosoms and oh, what the hell -- it's a love story.

Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow star here as contemporary academics. Each is an expert on a certain Victorian poet: Eckhart on one Randolph Henry Ash, Paltrow on Miss Christabel LaMotte. Research says the two poets never met, but a letter is found that suggests the two not only met but fell in love.

The literary mystery of the two poets permits Possession to go back in time to the 19th century. Randolph Henry Ash is portrayed by Jeremy Northam and Christabel LaMotte by Jennifer Ehle.

Once our modern heroes, Paltrow and Eckhart, take a journey across England together looking for clues about the elusive and long-dead poets, Possession flips back and forth in time in what are the most seductive sequences in the film. Over and above the people falling in love all over the place, Possession is a clever study of relationships, power and polite society. That's the regular turf of director Neil LaBute, although his previous films (Your Friends & Neighbours, In The Company Of Men, Nurse Betty) have examined the darker side of same.

LaBute co-wrote the script for Possession; between his work and Byatt's original novel, plenty of huge and chewy dialogue is available to the movie-goer. What a pleasure. On the other hand, much is left unsaid in the story, so pay attention. There are actual and emotional mysteries to keep track of, and doing so draws one deeper into the lives of the characters.

Possession is well cast, pretty to look at and smart in its observations about men and women together. The movie is far from perfect, but there's an intelligence about it that's refreshing.

Meanwhile, since yearning and desire are the basis of the story, some critics have described Possession as a "chick flick". Nah. It does have a touch of the bodice ripper about it, but in thought, not deed.

A tough guy like you can handle that. (More on Possession)

Director's lack of passion shortchanges the twin romances of 'Possession'

Friday, August 16, 2002

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

With its gifted filmmaking personnel, high-minded aspirations and intriguing, romantic story line, the film version of A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel "Possession" should have been something special, yet curiously, it isn't.

MOVIE REVIEW: POSSESSION

GRADE: C+

The film makes a fair star vehicle for Gwyneth Paltrow and an ambitious change of pace for director Neil LaBute ("In the Company of Men," "Nurse Betty"). It also has a delicious, if never completely convincing, antiquarian atmosphere.

But neither of its twin love stories ever quite jells, some of its complicated plot mechanics are rather clumsily staged, too many of its characters seem glaringly one-dimensional and it just doesn't leave us with all that much of an emotional kick.

The story is about an awkward American graduate student (Aaron Eckhart) -- changed from the working-class Briton of Byatt's novel -- who, while on a fellowship at the British Museum, finds a letter written by a famous Victorian poet stuffed in an old book.

Because the poet is famous for his love poems (and fidelity) to his wife, and the somewhat amorous letter is written to a minor woman poet of the time, the student contacts the woman's descendant (Paltrow), and the pair begin to investigate the relationship.

At this point, the movie begins to flash back and we follow two love stories -- one between the two poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle) in 1859, the other between the two scholarly sleuths as they trace the romantic mystery and gradually fall in love themselves.

As the prim and repressed descendant, Paltrow -- always at her best with a feigned British accent -- is winning, and so is the closed-off, bookish world the filmmakers strive to create, without a computer screen in sight for the entire running time.

But "Possession" is never as gripping as it needs to be as a scholarly mystery story, a low-key thriller or a mood piece that slyly communicates the cozy appeal of the kinder, gentler lost world of Victorian letters.

As an epic romance, the film falls even flatter, possibly because there's precious little chemistry to either of the pairings, possibly because the somewhat cold and clinical LaBute just doesn't have the passion for this sort of breathless love story.

The film wants to be "The English Patient" but doesn't have the elements that made that film a classic: sensitivity, perfect casting, a unique visual style and, underlying its grand action romance, a stubborn sense of honesty.

San Francisco Examiner

Publication date: 08/16/2002

Possession

BY JEFFREY M. ANDERSON
Of The Examiner Staff

**** [4 out of 4 stars]

Writer/director Neil LaBute made a stunning debut in 1997 with "In the Company of Men," and at the same time found himself labeled as a misogynist by those who misunderstood (or did not even see) the film.

In 2000, he delivered "Nurse Betty," a brilliantly daring and original comedy about a woman obsessed with meeting her favorite soap opera character in real life. Though it was far more digestible than "Men," it still came packed with a serious mean streak.

Now LaBute surprises us again with his new film "Possession," which opens today in Bay Area theaters. "Possession" accomplishes precisely what Robert Altman did last year with "Gosford Park": It takes dead aim and knocks the costume picture off its high horse.

In this picture, the dark, mean, misogynist LaBute is gone. "Possession" is so unabashedly romantic and passionately goofy that it not only confirms LaBute as one of America's great talents but also clocks in as one of the year's best American films.

LaBute's indispensable leading man Aaron Eckhart stars as Roland Michell, a perpetually unshaven poetry scholar light years away from his "In the Company of Men" narcissist and his "Nurse Betty" mullet-head.

While leafing through a volume on (fictional) Victorian romantic poet Randolph Henry Ash in the London library, Roland stumbles upon a sheaf of unmailed letters to one Christabel LaMotte, another poet (also fictional). Since Ash was supposed to have remained perpetually faithful to his wife, it opens up a breathtaking new twist on the past -- perhaps the most passionate illicit affair this side of "The Bridges of Madison County."

Roland tracks down Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow, sporting another British accent), a LaMotte expert, to help him discover the truth.

From there, the movie cuts to flashbacks of Ash (Jeremy Northam) and LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), as well as Ash's wife (Anna Massey), and LaMotte's lesbian lover. We follow their footsteps as Roland and Maud discover more and more clues about their lives and loves.

Roland and Maud journey across Europe following the ancient trail, Maud recalling snippets of LaMotte's poetry at opportune moments. Though they're occupying the present, the film does a remarkable job of making their journey seem out of time.

It's inevitable that Roland and Maud will fall in love, but LaBute stacks everything against them. Roland has given up on women permanently and doesn't want to get tied down. Maud already has a boyfriend, and besides her emotions tend to run toward the cool side. Not to mention that she's a serious, scholarly Brit and he's a carefree American.

Of course, none of this means anything. For all the sexual tension in the air, they might as well be jumping all over each other like a pair of rabbits.

LaBute seems to understand the glee involved with such a romance, the little tickle of excitement that comes when one's in love and immersed in a world of passion. Even the flashbacks -- which would normally be the stodgy and boring part of the movie -- tingle.

The minor plot contrivances reflect the overall giddiness of the story. Roland is lucky enough to overhear the villain's evil plot while lurking through a darkened library, and everything ends with a routine chase scene through a graveyard -- over Ash's newly opened grave.

As an actor, Eckhart seems to be perfectly in sync with LaBute; his performance is an endearing combination of irony and earnestness. We know he's winking at us (his permanent 5 o'clock shadow is a clue), but the excitement we feel at his unraveling the mystery and falling in love is genuine.

LaBute also relies heavily on the beautiful widescreen cinematography of Jean-Yves Escoffier, who also worked on "Nurse Betty," as well as Leos Carax's "The Lovers on the Bridge," Harmony Korine's "Gummo" and Gus Van Sant's "Good Will Hunting." Escoffier is a genius at capturing mood through location and weather, and in "Possession," you can practically smell the fresh English air and the hormones flying around. (One scene that takes place by a waterfall is especially potent.)

If the film has a drawback, it's the very popular Booker Award-winning novel by A.S. Byatt that it's based on. Passionate fans of the book (which I have not read) will probably balk at the changes LaBute and company made, such as turning the Roland character into an American.

Clint Eastwood took on the same challenge when he made "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"; barely anyone recognized the merits of that film because they were too busy griping about whether or not it followed the best-selling book. I predict the same kind of grumblings over "Possession."

Nevertheless, I probably experienced more sheer joy over this film than just about any other American film this year. It's a movie I'd take a date to any day of the week, and it's even perfect for romantic loners -- the type who likes to curl up and cry over a good book.

from the August 16, 2002 edition

Poetry slammed

By David Sterritt | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor

Some people think of colleges as ivory towers, full of absent-minded academics who can't adequately cope with the "real world."

As if professors didn't face the same challenges as people in other lines of work! Shaky job markets, low-paying positions, arrogant bosses, jockeying for promotions -- what's not "real world" about all this?

"Possession," the brilliant 1990 novel by A.S. Byatt, takes place in the real academic realm.

The main character is a would-be professor named Roland Michell, who hopes to snag a decent university post through small-time scholarship on Randolph Henry Ash, a second-rank Victorian poet. He spends his days scrutinizing obscure texts, tutoring students, and wondering if he'll ever get a full-time job.

Perusing an old book, he stumbles on a letter tucked into its pages -- written by Ash to an unidentified woman he obviously felt attracted to. Ash was a solidly married man with a respectable Victorian life, so Roland is shocked by his discovery.

He's also tantalized. Eager to solve the mystery, he contacts a more successful scholar named Maud Bailey, and together they ferret out Ash's hitherto unknown affair with a 19th-century poetess. Their quest takes them on a tour of Ash's haunts and hideaways, and stirs up several other academics who have vested interests in the case.

The movie adaptation of "Possession," directed by Neil LaBute, takes place in neither the academic world nor the so-called real world. The film unfolds in Hollywoodland, where no kind of reality intrudes for long, in either the modern-day or 19th-century scenes.

Every character is a simplified set of easily grasped personality traits. Every setting is bathed in creamy light and picturesque shadows. Intellectual obsessions with books, knowledge, and the ineluctable power of language -- the driving forces behind Byatt's novel -- are seen as mildly engaging interests pursued by reasonably smart folks whose speech and behavior never escape screenplay formulas.

Ditto for the casting. Roland, a melancholy man with a wary look, becomes Aaron Eckhart, a dynamic dude who couldn't look wary if he tried. The formidable Dr. Bailey becomes the adorable Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ash's imposingly Darwin-like visage morphs into Jeremy Northam's photogenic features. Jennifer Ehle looks and sounds right as Ash's lover, but she gets the shortest shrift of all the major characters. Most of the acting consists of winning smiles and wistful pouts.

The problem with "Possession" isn't that it's filmed in a lackluster way, but that it shouldn't have been filmed at all. Byatt's novel is an adventure in language, telling its story through a kaleidoscopic array of Victorian-style poetry and prose, alongside gripping accounts of the characters' activities and escapades.

Some kind of venturesome experimental movie could be made from these materials, but there's no point in extracting the bare bones of Byatt's plot for purposes of bland Hollywood romance. The more you love language, the more this is a picture to avoid.

Date: 8.15.02

For better or verse

POSSESSION

*** [3 out of 4 stars]

A.S. Byatt's opaque prose and cerebral characters present a forbidding challenge to prospective filmmakers. Before this adaption of her 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, only one out of her 11 published works of fiction had been made into a film: the middling Angels and Insects (1995), based on her novella Morpho Eugenia.

Possession has a lot to offer a screenwriter: two romances, characters that emote more than the average Byatt creations, and a mystery that unfolds simultaneously in the 1980s and in the mid 19th century. In the liabilities column, the paperback is over 500 pages long and the love stories are still decidedly chilly, even considering the main characters are British intellectuals and academics.

So props are due to writer-director Neil LaBute for simply tackling the project. LaBute's previous films, like In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbours (1999), established two things: that he was great with actors, and that he had no fear of making the audience extremely uncomfortable. In this latest film, his skill with actors is still very much in evidence, but there's no sign of his ability to make viewers squirm (or indeed, feel very much of anything).

Aaron Eckhart, who has been in all of LaBute's films, appears the most at ease in Possession, playing Roland Michell, an American academic who stumbles across a letter written by (fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Ash (Jeremy Northam) to an unknown woman. The quest to discover the letter's recipient leads him to Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a frosty academic who specializes in one of Ash's contemporaries, the proto-feminist, lesbian poet Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle).

As LaMotte and Ash's story gradually unfolds, there's some enjoyably subtle academic-baiting, since Maud and Roland, with all their knowledge, can't possibly know what really happened between the two poets. The film is also successful in conveying the urgent passion of a genuinely exciting, new discovery, something that rarely happens in Victorian studies. However, the script relies too heavily on coincidence as a device in clearing up the mystery, and several elements -- like the attraction between Maud and Roland developing in similar ways as the affair between Ash and LaMotte -- come over as obvious and banal.

This is as respectful a film as Byatt fans could hope for, though lovers of the book may wonder why it's necessary. However, LaBute fans may reject Possession: it's not his best work, and it never reaches a level beyond the average Masterpiece Theatre adaptation. Those unfamiliar with the novel will wonder what all the fuss was about. CATHARINE TUNNACLIFFE

San Diego Union-Tribune

More to 'Possession' than meets the eye

By David Elliott
Union-Tribune Movie Critic

August 15, 2002

With "Possession," director and writer Neil LaBute executes one of the radical U-turns. It's as if Alfred Hitchcock had made a warm film about kids and their Shetland ponies, or Fritz Lang had opted to do an ice-skating musical.

The Critic Says

*** 1/2 [3 1/2 stars out of 4]

LaBute, his reputation made by such cold-eyed, morally serrating comedies as "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends & Neighbors," has cast his favorite cynical actor, Aaron Eckhart, in a gorgeously romantic film of A.S. Byatt's much esteemed novel. "Possession" drops Eckhart's big-dude American into a totally English world (plus a patch of France), as an archival assistant at the British Museum in London.

His Roland Mitchell, smoothly able to snap back fast at anti-Yank gags, lucks upon the hidden letters of a Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash (played as a more composed yet smoldering Heathcliff by Jeremy Northam). Just as the museum is staging a modern tribute exhibit to Ash's famous love poems to his chaste, idealized wife, Mitchell realizes he is on the trail of evidence revealing Ash's secret, then quite erotic, affair with a poetess and painter, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), whose lesbian lover is chagrined.

Roland zippers into alliance with a young but feared-for-smarts professor at Lincoln University, the Ash/LaMotte specialist Maud Bailey. Their repartee has some of the sporty spark, the dawning sexiness, of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps."

Maud is Gwyneth Paltrow, with her proven Brit accent nicely recalibrated, her hair shining, her eyes a-fidget with primly excited mischief as she and Roland sleuth and pilfer through fabulous English locations, unearthing letters and poems. There is enraptured reading before a crackling fireplace, and also some rather comical grave-robbing.

"Possession" has a witty script, filleted from Byatt's novel largely by playwright David Henry Hwang. It's an "AAA" (for adult) movie in the summer season of "XXX." Mall dudes, avoid it!

The film looks wonderful (key credit: Jean-Yves Escoffier). It is engagingly literary without being too fancy; you can enjoy or ignore the Elgin Marbles, and the reference to Giambattista Vico. It has a silken, ticktock interlock of the modern and Victorian segments, and relishes its two sets of sexy camera objects (Northam and Ehle, Paltrow and Eckhart).

Some of the skirmishing by rival scholars (and thieves) remains trivial, mere stuffing. The eloquent Victorian passion of the covert 19th-century lovers tends to awe and overawe the moderns, their frisky liberties so brittle with hesitation. But the contrast is what makes the movie special and adroitly saves it from turning precious.

Underpinning all the brisk pleasures, "Possession" is truly about possession. About how the heart has its reasons, imperiously. Call that the old jazz, yet here with an enduring and quite endearing syncopation.

Denver Rocky Mountain News

Our Rating: C-

Without the usual misogyny, director has little to say

August 16, 2002

Don't bet the rent on Maud Bailey and Roland Michell's winning couple-of-the-year honors.

They're two less-than-fascinating characters in Possession, director Neil LaBute's less-than-scintillating adaptation of A.S. Byatt's enormously popular 1990 novel.

Watching Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart play Maud and Roland, literary sleuths who become romantically involved, proves about as interesting as watching parchment yellow, as LaBute strives for depth without producing much.

The most interesting news about Possession involves LaBute, whose previous movies (In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty) have plenty of nasty kick. Female viewers will no doubt be pleased that he's toned down the misogyny that has afflicted his male characters to assay Byatt's novel, with its hyper-literary awareness.

Perhaps cowed by a respected novel with literary cache, LaBute puts his authorial personality on hold. This might have been more welcome had he found something with which to replace it. Instead of cynicism and caustic humor, we get stretches of dull exposition.

The story takes place in England past and present, revolving around a secret concerning 19th century romantic poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), a fictionalized character we meet in the movie's many flashbacks.

In doing research, Eckhart's character, a disheveled American grad student who was British in the book, discovers a letter suggesting that Ash may have had an affair with a female poet, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). It's important news because Ash had been considered a supremely devoted husband, a ferociously monogamous romantic.

Absent any driving passion, LaBute floats between past and present in scenes that do little to inform one another, and he totally misses the excitement of a literary search, not to mention the intense and often-preposterous drive of academic ambition.

Eckhart's character, we're told, is incapable of loving. We're not sure why, although we know he once hurt someone. Donning another effortless English accent, Paltrow flashes the whitest teeth in Western civilization, but nothing about her performance catches fire.

On screen, some of the details of Byatt's novel turn into shopworn conventions involving lost letters, missed opportunities and timely coincidences.

I guess you could say LaBute is trying to clean up his act. His interest in relationships may have made him seem a likely candidate to bring a script by David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones to the screen.

The most interesting relationship in the movie takes place away from its dramatic center. Lena Heady plays Christabel's wounded female lover.

But just about everything in this dry bit of business seems limp, building toward a poorly staged scene in a graveyard, which could be just where this slumbering bit of folly will land.

Robert Denerstein is the film critic.