Randolph Henry Ash Movie Pictures

December 5, 2002 — 11.00am

Antonia Byatt's Possession is about as literary as a novel can be. It sits so happily inside its covers that I couldn't imagine its story being told in any other form.

That was before the American director Neil LaBute came along. He has carved into its thickets of allusion, allegory, metaphor and verse, found a throughline and built himself a film. Not a perfect film, but an appealingly offbeat one. When did you last see a mainstream movie romance about lovers turned on by their shared devotion to Victorian literature?

This is a couple whose idea of an erotic night in is to get down and dusty with a box of old letters in the basement of the British Museum.

Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) and Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) are romantics, for whom the word is spelt with a capital letter. They're academics, brought together by the idea of love as experienced by two 19th-century Romantic poets, whose work they are studying. It's easy to see why LaBute chose to make the picture under the banner Contagious Films. He is telling a story about the way it feels to catch love - like influenza - by vicarious association with the severely afflicted.

Roland gets the bug while researching the life of Randolph Henry Ash, a Victorian poet laureate. Ash, he suspects, was secretly in love with Christabel LaMotte, a fellow poet whose work is much admired by contemporary academic feminists. Chief among the LaMotte disciples is the aristocratic Maud, a beauty as well as a brain, and at first she's not interested in Roland or his hunch about the illicit affair between her Victorian and his.

But gradually he convinces her and together they set out to prove he's right. The script, meanwhile, begins interweaving their story with scenes from the romantic adventures of Ash (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel (Jennifer Ehle).

It's quite a switch for LaBute, independent American film-making's most notorious cynic on the subject of love. His bleakest effort so far is probably his caustic little debut picture, In the Company of Men. Eckhart starred in that, as well. He was cast as a misogynist with a limitless capacity for psychological sadism, so there's a certain irony attached to watching him play Roland, whose desire for Maud is tempered by guilt. It seems he has already hurt other women in the name of passion and is reluctant to repeat the crime.

Not that he is love-shy. Unlike Byatt's original creation - a chronically diffident character stuck in a relationship long gone sour - Eckhart's Roland is not shy of anything. The film dispenses with the relationship and transforms him from a withdrawn Englishman into a brash American. He's a larrikin, which is good for a laugh, and that's no bad thing. For all her virtues, Byatt isn't strong on humour, and humour is what is needed if the story is to sparkle on screen. Humour along with energy, and Eckhart has loads of that. The concentration in his gaze could be caused by nothing more sinister than a slight strabismus. But this foxy gleam gives him an electric, and slightly predatory, zest for living. At work, he wheels around on his office chair with a restless physicality which brings new meaning to the term "desk jockey".

And LaBute, too, knows how to move, switching between love stories as if smoothly manipulating a pair of sliding doors. When Maud and Roland go travelling in Yorkshire, retracing the steps taken by Ash and Christabel a century before, their car glides out of shot just as the steam train bearing their 19th-century counterparts chugs into view from the other side of the frame.

The Victorian lovers are undoubtedly the sexier pair. Having done so many period pictures, the gallant Northam is now so much at home in the past that I no longer see him as one of us. And although Ehle looked a lot better in Pride and Prejudice's Empire line dresses than she does in a crinoline, she's fine without it. The conjunction of long-repressed sexuality with a candle-lit four-poster and the slow unlacing of a whalebone corset may be a cliche, but I'm happy to say that LaBute doesn't let that put him off. And nor should you.

The main flaw in the modern-day love story is Paltrow, who might well be the one who is wearing the corset. Preoccupied with perfecting Maud's cut-glass diction and regal carriage, she completely misses the point that this is a smart, combative woman who thinks there's something very sexy about a man answering back.

And I could go on quibbling. LaBute can't get the Victorian sentimentality of the film's ending to work. But all in all, it's pretty good. He has taken a novel which seemed unfilmable and come up with an adaptation which is, as it ought to be - a genuine act of possession.

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Randolph Henry Ash Movie Pictures

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/possession-20021205-gdfx05.html

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