Love in a cold climate

Director Neil LaBute, with help from a glowing Gwyneth Paltrow, defies all expectations in his glorious, difficult and tender screen adaptation of A.S. Byatt's literary romance "Possession."

By Stephanie Zacharek

Aug 16, 2002 | Whenever a beloved book, or even just a well-respected one, gets made into a movie, people who love books and the words inside them automatically feel a degree of apprehension. If we're honest, we might admit that the question isn't always so much "Will the movie fail to capture my sense of this book?" as much as "Will the movie, simply by virtue of being a movie and not a book, disappoint me?"

On the face of it, you couldn't have picked a more inappropriate filmmaker to adapt A.S. Byatt's intimately detailed, dappled "Possession," a literary detective novel but above all a love story, than Neil LaBute, director of pictures like "In the Company of Men" and "Nurse Betty." But sometimes the wrong director can make all the difference.

LaBute's "Possession" takes significant liberties with Byatt's novel -- chief among them, he has made the story's male romantic lead, the impoverished academic researcher Roland Michell (played by Aaron Eckhart), an American instead of a student-poor Englishman. Several minor characters have been excised completely, and the novel's somewhat mannered dialogue (which is appropriate to the book's characters and works nicely on the page) has been very loosely adapted to make it swing -- in other words, it has been smoothed and streamlined and perhaps, at times, too neatly patted into effective movie speech.

But LaBute, in his infinite and marvelous wrongness, infuses his movie with a delicacy of feeling that couldn't be more right for the material. LaBute obviously approached the project with his hands and his heart open: Frame by frame, it's a humble picture, a movie that isn't afraid to be an entertainment. The subtitle of Byatt's book is "A Romance," and LaBute clearly uses that term as his touchstone. Straightforward and old-fashioned in the best possible senses of both those words, "Possession" is a movie that puts itself squarely in the service of the lovers who inhabit it.

The intricacies of Byatt's narrative sometimes means those characters aren't the easiest masters to serve. "Possession" is about two pairs of lovers, one from the past and one from the present, whose stories are woven into one thick golden plait: The first pair are the (fictitious) Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel Lamotte (Jennifer Ehle), whose illicit affair comes to light when Roland finds a lost love letter tucked between the pages of an old book. The second pair are Roland himself and Dr. Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), scholars who are devoted to the study of these poets and who set off on a search for clues about their secret connection, falling in love reluctantly and tentatively themselves.

LaBute, with the help of his fellow screenwriters David Henry Hwang ("M. Butterfly") and Laura Jones ("High Tide," "The Portrait of a Lady"), succeeds in streamlining Byatt's intricate plot without unbraiding it completely; he seems to have grasped the urgency of preserving the spirit of Byatt's rich language and multilayered, poetic details, while intuiting the potential dangers of getting lost in its misty quagmires.

But best of all, with "Possession" LaBute offers us one of the most delectable surprises of moviegoing: He has defied our expectations. I've never been a fan of LaBute's movies. The things his defenders like about him -- what they see as his "edginess," humor or absolute modernity -- I have perceived as a strained and pretentious sanctimoniousness; he has had a tendency to condescend to his characters, the better to make audiences feel good about themselves in the cheapest, easiest fashion.

In "In the Company of Men," in which two slick middle-management types cruelly seduce a beautiful deaf woman just for sport, LaBute used his characters as programmed voiceboxes for his prefab views on sexual politics, devising an elaborately contrived situation to prove what scumbags men can be. (If they're such scumbags by nature, why does he need so much contrivance to prove it?) "Nurse Betty" purportedly entreated us to share one woman's feel-good delusional daydream, but it was really an invitation for would-be sophisticates to laugh at her dopey middle-American hopes and motivations.

Next Page: Gwyneth Paltrow: An American actress who may be most believable as an Englishwoman

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