Possession D+
Possession is a strange turn for writer/director Neil LaBute, usually known for his narrow view on women (bordering on misogynist) in such films as
Nurse Betty and
In The Company of Men. Here he does an about face with an utterly romantic but very thin quasi-period piece. Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an American teaching assistant working in England who happens upon lost correspondence to a lover written by a famously monogamous 19th century poet, Randolph Ash (Jeremy Northam). Roland finds that the lover might in fact be another poet, this one a woman named Christabel (Jennifer Ehle), and so he goes to Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), who specializes in Christabel’s poetry, to try to track down the truth. Michell, an eager and enthusiastic American, eventually coaxes the reluctant Bailey into helping him follow Ash and Christabel’s trail through Europe. While Michell and Bailey hunt down the places visited and the things done by the poets,
Possession flashes back to the past and then forward to the present, chronicling both Ash’s love affair with Christabel, and the eventual relationship that springs up between Maude and Roland.
Mr. LaBute’s film, which he helped adapt from A.S. Byatt’s novel, suffers from the limited minutes a film can devote to the background detail and character depth that the book had the luxury of expanding on. Byatt’s poetry, which she herself wrote for the fictional poets of the book, is lovely and sweet and
Possession is unique in that most of the contemporary seduction takes place with either Maude or Roland reading the poetry out loud while the other listens. Both characters watch the reader and soak up the words with a hunger for the new lines about the poets’ affair, and as they listen intently what begins as interest in the poets turns into mutual attraction. Soon Maude and Roland are trying to figure out the nature of their affection, which is hampered by their work and the baggage each brings from past relationships; simultaneously LaBute shows Ash and Christabel’s doomed affair (often at the same time, crosscutting one hundred and fifty years earlier), which is hampered by more romantic issues like Christabel’s jealous lesbian companion and Ash’s sexless relationship with his wife. Neither relationship is fully understandable as Mr. LaBute is content simply portraying the relationships as they spring up, instead of showing exactly why each character was drawn to the other (Roland, for example, claims he forsakes woman and relationships with them, but soon Maude’s cold demeanor inexplicably seduces him out of his mindset).
This would be all well and good if the film was a dreamy ode to difficult love, or maybe if there was a strong parallel between the love affairs of two different centuries, or if Maude and Roland’s exploration of the poets’ affair helped them understand and work out their own problems, but Possession’s film adaptations decides to leave it at having Roland and Maude carry on a typical modern relationship and Ash and Christabel carry on a glossy, romantic, and very non-confrontational period fling. Mr. LaBute unfortunately cuts the occasionally fun, wistful atmosphere of the Maude/Roland adventure by misusing some gorgeous European locations and photographing an unnecessary amount of automobiles and shots of cars traveling-at first the film shies delightfully away from technology, as Roland and Maude venture out of London to the coast and to the countryside there is nary a cellphone or laptop in sight which adds considerably to the brief, elegant nature of their relationship…that is until there is a long tracking shot of a Saab cruising along interrupting the view of a charming English villa. With the film’s tendency to be wise-cracky in the first half, and buffered with a thin and pointless “evil” plot in the second, the contemporary love story has little going for it other than Ms. Paltrow’s predictable but lovely performance. She does her usual cold looking, pursed lips and worried frown thing for a while, but she believably melts just enough to a pleasant mixture of charming and brittle when Roland turns on his charms. Unfortunately Aaron Eckhart possesses an utter lack of romanticism, and his perpetually unshaven face and grubby clothes do not help his case much.
The 19th century story is similarly flawed, though its same qualities of being an overly typical and unexplained romance can be excused as it is being told through passionate letters, and the passion from the letters certainly seeps into Mr. Northam and Ms. Ehle’s performances, which are breathless and attractively idealized. Where the contemporary setting lacked a believable male lead in Mr. Eckhart, a finer 19th century romantic poet than Jeremy Northam is impossible to produce and though Ms. Ehle’s performance is repetitious, she is pretty and forlorn, and has eyes filled with the knowledge that every thing she sees she will lose, which is tragic enough to forget the monotony of her never changing expression.
Neither story is perfect, and neither story unites somewhere along the way to reach some sort of connection between the torments of an old, romantic kind of love and the kind that exists in the hustle and bustle of modern jobs in modern times. The fault rests squarely on the shoulders of Mr. LaBute and the people who helped him adapt the work, too many cuts were made around the modern romance to make it compelling, and similar cuts kept the old romance merely typical. If only one had something to say about the other, or maybe the problem is it is just too difficult to create a modern relationship that is as interesting or as passionate as the romances of old.
Possession tries to crush too much action with too little detail into too small of a container, and though some bits and pieces fit nicely, it never gets all of it right.
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