Filmmaking for the literary minded, Neil LaBute's Possession brings AS Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel to the big screen, boiling down the complex and scholarly novel to its elements and adding a few dubious touches of its own.
The film follows two mismatched contemporary academics -- frosty British feminist Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) and brash American researcher Roland Michell (Aaron Echkart) -- who are drawn together in an investigation of a possible erotic liaison between a revered Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), and pioneer lesbian and feminist icon Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle).
But Neil LaBute's screen version is not for the literal-minded as LaBute insists on injecting Hollywood glamour into tweedy English academia. As Maud Bailey, Paltrow plays an academic whose fierce feminist stance once caused her to shave her hair off to make herself less attractive. Still, she now seems to have no trouble with her designer wardrobe and beautifully appointed apartment. And Roland Michell, transformed from Byatt's meek, working-class British researcher into Eckhart's upstart, unshaven Yank would now seem more at home in a script meeting or brandishing a digicam than burrowing into the dusty world of nineteenth century poetry.
In contrast, Northam and Ehle seem to be thoroughly relishing their Victorian roles, whose fire and passion contrast with today's emotionally stuttered lovers. As they veer towards a suitably poetic climax, the contemporary lovers are reduced to fending off not only each other, but rival Ash researchers -- an American hotshot with a big budget and his duplicitous aide, Maud's ex-lover -- culminating in a ridiculous midnight graveyard robbery squabble.
Possession has already garnered comparisons with The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), not just for its dual Victorian era/modern day setting, but also for the resemblance of Ehle to Meryl Streep. Similarly, while it has been noted that Karel Reisz and Harold Pinter made some clever decisions while never quite cracking the essential unadaptability of John Fowles' novel, so LaBute and his team have failed to fully succeed in adapting this equally brilliant but untranslatable novel, but have delivered an engaging romantic melodrama nonetheless.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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