Flak Magazine: Review of Possession, 9-18-02

A.S. Byatt's "Possession," winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, was made to be a movie. Some might argue that it had too much literary baggage — academic office humor and discourse on everything from feminist scholarship to ancient French mythology, not to mention whole chapters of original epic poems. But the heart of "Possession" couldn't be simpler. The story's about parallel love stories — two (fictional) Victorian poets and a pair of modern-day academics who study them. The venerable Randolph Henry Ash once carried on a secret affair with Christabel LaMotte, who is celebrated by Women's Studies types as a proto-feminist and lesbian. They wrote elaborate allusions to each other in their poetry, and the world never suspected.

The movie, however, doesn't need to approach these subtleties. Just say something to the effect of "The married poet laureate and a lesbian?!" and audiences get the gist. It's a literary mystery, an English thesis with the heart of a bodice-ripper.

Roland Mitchell (Aaron Eckhart), an American poet working in the British Library, swipes the first clue from Ash's archived papers, but he needs a LaMotte expert to find the whole story. Enter the posh and frosty Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow puts on the accent again; shouldn't real British blondes like Cate Blanchett form a union?). They get swept away by the guilty pleasure of their secret.

It doesn't take a director's eye to visualize how the novel should look on screen. The text of the Ash/LaMotte correspondence seems destined to melt into voiceovers as the scene flashes back to the 1850s. Picture the transitions: One minute we're at the train station with the Victorians, but when the camera swings around the corner, we see Roland and Maud parking the Saab. The couples gaze at the same waterfall, sleep in the same inn.

So it is with Neil LaBute's interpretation of "Possession." It's a departure for a director whose thematic calling cards include sexual politics, misogyny and the banality of evil yuppies in films like In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. It's not that LaBute has never been capable of empathy (see Renée Zellweger in Nurse Betty), but vulnerability and victimhood tend to go together in his stories.

Possession plays by the rules of romance, complete with violins. The most satisfying parts of the film are the richly textured flashbacks. Costume drama veterans Jeremy Northam (Emma) and Jennifer Ehle (BBC's "Pride and Predjudice") play the lovers. The modern love story is sincere and conventional, though, almost to a fault. Paltrow and Eckhart are a potentially scintillating duo. There's something right about his tousled, stubbled look paired with her self-contained elegance. But it's here that the film makes its most significant alteration to the story, one that changes the dynamics of the attraction.

Possession recasts Roland as an American. Recall Paltrow's real-life complaint that British men are insecure and lack basic courtship skills. The novel's Roland Mitchell would be guilty as charged. He's bookish, self-effacing and insecure about his lower-class roots, but a good soul. Eckhart as Roland Mitchell, on the other hand, exudes more Henry Miller than Jude the Obscure. At times, he forgets to be a tentative intellectual and relishes the sexual tension with Maud. Why is he skulking around in moth-eaten academia anyway? The backstory establishes that Roland is retreating from grand passion because he has hurt people in the past. He's "off women," but only for their own good.

But while the switch mostly works, a rakish American leading man can't excuse shoddy dialogue; one parting line to Maud: "I guess I'll just go look up shit on the microfiche and suffer over you." Audiences looking for an intelligent love story will be disappointed by this kind of uneven writing in the screenplay by LaBute, David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) and Laura Jones (Angela's Ashes), which also drastically thins the secondary characters. The flashbacks use the novel's elegant prose, but LaBute doesn't give the present-day scenes over to Byatt's voice in an apparent attempt to prove that he can do romance on his own terms. Unfortunately, he flubs every opportunity to put an original spin on the modern couple. He needs to give Roland and Maud something after scrapping mutual Britishness and their opinions on sexuality and esoteric verse. Trite speeches about the fear of intimacy don't count.

It's hard to say what makes one love story corny or another rapturous. Why are some courtships deliciously inevitable and others, like Possession, just sort of pleasant to look at? It's highly subjective (though quantifiable if you look at the difference between this movie's ticket sales compared to, say, My Big Fat Greek Wedding), but you know you're in trouble when the drama of the love stories themselves can't keep your interest. There's a token complication to Possession's plot: A boorish American professor may lay claim to the manuscripts before Roland and Maud find the end of the poets' saga. But who's going to sit through the whole movie worrying about that? What's needed, and what's missing, is for the audience to fall in love with Roland and Maud falling in love with each other.

— Megan Christensen (mmc3e4 at mizzou dot edu)