Dispossession

Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning bestseller Possession. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration: There’s always Michael Bay.) LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be more British if it drank tea at four and flew the Union Jack.

One of the movie’s departures is to change the lead male character, Roland Michell, from a Brit to an American, perhaps to draw in domestic audiences (a lame reason), perhaps to accommodate the casting of LaBute-favorite Aaron Eckhart (not much better). Roland, a scruffy researcher, works for Professor Blackadder (Tom Hickey), an expert in the life of fictional nineteenth-century poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), a romantic famed for his expressions of devotion to his wife. One day in the library, examining Ash’s own copy of a book, Roland discovers what appears to be a love letter from Ash to a woman not his wife. It’s a potentially earthshaking find, the sort that can set up an academic for life.

When his boss is too dismissive even to listen to Roland’s tale, Roland takes it upon himself to follow up. On a lead from his caddish associate Fergus Wolff (Toby Stephens), he contacts Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), an expert in the life of Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), the less-renowned poet who is Roland’s best candidate for the mystery lover.

At first, it all seems rather unlikely to Maud. Christabel, who just happens to be Maud’s great-great-great aunt, had only one known romance — with another woman. Nor is the somewhat formal, frosty Maud wild about the intrusion of this presumptuous American. Soon, though, they uncover more lost documents that lend credence to Roland’s idea and begin to visit the locales of this 140-year-old love affair.

Of course, it doesn’t take a poetry scholar to predict that Roland and Maud are going to end up falling under the spell of Ash and LaMotte’s epic passion and, in some seemingly less-grand modern way, relive it.

An American like LaBute taking on such a project may seem no stranger than, say, Taiwanese Ang Lee directing Sense and Sensibility. But with imagination, one can understand why Lee ended up making the best Jane Austen film adaptation of the ’90s: His upbringing in a highly ritualized, stratified society, which had provided the thematic roots of his earlier films, gave him a better feel for Austen’s period than any British director of his age, raised in a vastly different, modern culture, could have had.

Sadly, LaBute doesn’t bring any equivalent advantage to Possession. In fact, his temperament seems largely inappropriate: The book is a romance, a story of grand passion, and LaBute is, to put it mildly, not the warmest of directors.

Nor does he entirely solve the many narrative problems the book presents for a film adaptation. In the book, the nineteenth-century story unfolds through documents — letters, poems and diaries — found by the two contemporary characters. Not surprisingly, LaBute presents these episodes dramatically, intercutting them with the modern story for counterpoint. But these scenes rely heavily on voiceover readings of the texts, which keeps us at a distance. The story’s plot revelations should move us, some of them profoundly; yet they feel merely like puzzle pieces dropping into place at regular intervals with no impact. Likewise, the thoughts and inner lives of the modern protagonists go almost altogether untranslated to the screen. Roland and Maud keep making elliptical references to their own pasts, which are never made clear.

All that is left of the emotional content are a few scenes of romantic passion, only one of which could be said to achieve anything close to a grand level. It’s too little, too late; and one can only wonder what someone like, say, Anthony Minghella (Truly Madly Deeply, The English Patient) could have done with the project.