Lusciously beautiful love story

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This article was published 23/08/2002 (8776 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘IT’S terrible, really, when you think about it. Men and women, together,” muses one of the characters in this lusciously beautiful love story.

That has certainly always been the theme of Neil LaBute’s films, particularly In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, both lacerating examinations of misogyny, impotence, aggression, sexual nausea and all-round bad behaviour.

The American director has never before expressed the idea with such restraint, however. His unexpected teaming with the Booker Prize-winning novel by English writer A.S. Byatt has added texture, richness — and a much bigger budget — to his naturally tragic view of male-female relationships.

And in the end, Byatt and LaBute together manage to muster up a measure of hopefulness — a celebration of passion, certainly, and even the possibility that it won’t completely wreck those who give way to it.

Roland Mitchell (played by LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart), a scruffy, broke, low-level American academic, is in London researching the life and work of Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), one of the respectable grey eminences of Victorian poetry.

Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cool, collected professor of gender studies at an established university, is an expert on Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), a neglected Victorian writer.

When the two scholars stumble on to the possibility that Randolph and Christabel had a secret affair, we follow them on a literary detective hunt. Roland and Maud trail across England and France in search of proof of “a grand passion,” at the same time trying to deny their own feelings.

The central irony of the novel is that the Victorians, who have an unfair reputation as prudes, act and write with full-blooded directness. Randolph and Christabel’s passion finds perfect expression in the work of Northam, as the 19th-century ideal of the robust intellectual, and Ehle, who always manages to look like she’s lit from inside by some secret knowledge.

The moderns, meanwhile, can put passion off indefinitely, dithering around with vague relationship talk — over-analyzed, pop-psychologized, hesitant, neurotic.

Eckhart carries the thread of the film with a casually charismatic performance, but Paltrow is miscast. So much of Maud’s characterization rests on the fine shadings of British class, language and intonation — that English genius for using icy politeness in order to be rude, for example — and Paltrow’s approach to these things retains the stiffness of imitation.

LaBute also has some understandable trouble compressing the Victorian heft of Byatt’s novel, which is filled with lengthy quotations, Dickensian minor characters and serpentine sub-plots. (Byatt’s exposure of academe as a snake-pit of ambition, mercenary manoeuvering, back-stabbing feuds and ideological axe-grinding is barely hinted at, for example.) LaBute struggles to find visual equivalences for Byatt’s story, which is essentially about the romance of letters, documents and diaries, about the seduction of the printed word.

Still, with all these problems, Possession has moments of complete esthetic and emotional rapture. And in our thin-blooded 21st-century world, that’s really something.