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The film adaptation of Possession, based on A.S. Hyatt's Booker-prize winning novel, is streamlined for impatient tastes.
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 29, 2002
Viewers can't avoid being transported through time by Neil LaBute's adaptation of the romantic novel, Possession. First to the 19th century where a fictional, married poet and a feminist woman of privilege share a secret affair, then back to modern-day literary detectives uncovering that love and discovering their own.
Then to 1981 and The French Lieutenant's Woman, a movie that already used that parallel-passion motif with a star whose physical and costumed resemblance to a Possession player is constantly distracting. It isn't Jennifer Ehle's fault that she's a dead ringer for Meryl Streep but LaBute pushes that connection to Karel Reisz's film, maybe subconsciously in an effort to prove that, yes, Possession is also a tony tale of intellectual lust across the ages.
The material should be enough to convince us. Certainly the Booker Prize-winning novel by A.S. Hyatt was praised for its intelligence, but the movie feels slightly dumbed-down, streamlined for impatient tastes. LaBute and two co-writers Americanized a decidedly British story, changing the nationality of one contemporary lover (Aaron Eckhart) and hiring a U.S. star (Gwyneth Paltrow) who can handle the accent for his mate. Details are diluted and short cuts are common, although handsomely photographed.
Yet the film does have its swooning movements when a viewer surrenders to the characters' pangs of repressed affections and desperate measures. If it all seems a bit too pat at the conclusion, that doesn't dispel the occasional pleasures of getting there.
Eckhart plays Roland Michell, an impulsive Yank working at a London museum tracing the career of poet Randolph Henry Ash. The poet is played by Jeremy Northam in flashbacks that, in LaBute's most inspired passages, segue to the present with a simple camera pan. Roland is browsing through one of Ash's personal books when he finds a love letter to a woman who obviously isn't his wife. Since Ash's career was built on fidelity and the poems he created to express it, the discovery is a stunner.
Roland engages the assistance of Ash's chilly descendant, Maud Bailey (Paltrow), an academic interested in protecting her ancestor's reputation. She also has no use for romance, a condition that will soften as she and Roland trudge closer to the truth.
The audience knows that truth first through LaBute's flashbacks. Ash (Jeremy Northam) did, indeed, have an affair with a woman revealed to be Christabel LaMotte (Ehle), who gives up her lesbian lover (Lena Headley) for Ash. Possession, then, evolves into a love pentagon requiring more than the film's 102-minute running time to fully explore.
LaBute's talent, previously expressed in the gender collisions of In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty and Your Friends and Neighbors, doesn't have that kind of emotional venom to work with here. Even those dastardly acts propelling the third act of Possession feel too polite for his abrasive style. It's a good pastime for mature romantics but not the bracing experience we expect from LaBute. This feels more like a breather than creative growth.
The performances are fine, with Eckhart -- possibly the best actor you couldn't name right away -- making his strongest move from caddish roles in LaBute's earlier films to leading-man status. Paltrow simply has the best bogus British accent of any American actor, polished in Emma and her Oscar-winning role in Shakespeare in Love. Northam is quietly dashing, utterly sympathetic even in infidelity.
Then there's Ehle, whose misty eyes and sheer-cliff nose, framed by hoods and hats, are Streep all over again, which is something of a compliment. When Ash meets Christabel at a train station she's dressed almost identically to Streep's poster art pose for The French Lieutenant's Woman, adding to the comparison. Ehle isn't merely aping an idol; the same uncanny resemblance was noticeable in Paradise Road and Sunshine. But it's an unusual challenge. She can either grow as an actor to match the resemblance or get stuck in Ironweed and Heartburn prequels with Jack Nicholson look-alike Christian Slater.
Grade: B
Director: Neil LaBute
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle
Screenplay: David Henry Kwang, Laura Jones, Neil LaBute, based on the novel by A.S. Hyatt
Rating: PG-13; sensuality, profanity
Running time: 102 min.