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Friday, August 16, 2002
Director's lack of passion shortchanges the twin romances of 'Possession'
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.
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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.
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