POSSESSION

Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam
Director: Neil LaBute
Rated: M15+

For those of us who loved A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, there is one major change in this screen adaptation that will drive us nuts.

In the book, Byatt has Roland Michell as a working-class English lad with brains to burn. It sets up a terrific study in class snobbery as he has to deal with the upper class academic Maud Bailey.

But US director Neil LaBute decided to turn Michell into a dishevelled, loud and visiting American scholar.

Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an assistant to Professor Blackadder (Tom Hickey), who is the world authority on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam).

Ash was poet laureate in Queen Victoria’s court. Michell discovers some of Ash’s letters in the British Library which indicates that the publicly proper poet may have had an affair. Michell theorises that the liaison could have been with Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), a lesser-known poet of the same period. Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the world’s expert on LaMotte and together she and Michell uncover the truth.

This very handsome film is big on romance and soft on drama. Where Byatt set up a parallel in class confllct between Michell and Bailey and to a lesser degree between Ash and LaMotte, LaBute gives an overly sentimental reading to the Victorian love story, and proposes a colonial conflict between a yank and a Pom for the contemporary tale.

The performances are all pleasing with Paltrow rendering again a very convincing English accent. Aaron Eckhart has great screen presence, but Jeremy Northam’s Ash lacks the fear of exposure that the Queen’s poet would have risked if he was found out. Jennifer Ehle and Lena Headey, as her long-time companion Blanche, are perfectly cast.

There are clumsy narrative set-ups in the book and the film which does not help sell the believability of the story, like Christabel’s room being undisturbed for 100 years.

Furthermore, as the film progresses it is hard to see where Maud’s reputation comes from as some fairly big gaps appear in her supposedly encyclopaedic knowledge about LaMotte.