A thoughtful review of Neil LaBute's new film version of A.S. Byatt's Possession

Byatt's academic mystery-romance is a tour-de-force of scholarly fiction. How to translate this particularly bookish project onto film?

Sorry, let's start again

Neil LaBute's latest project is a startling attempt to graft his very 21st century concerns with men and women onto Byatt's densely woven intellectual entertainment.

No...still doesn't seem like the right...try this one....

In a digital era, when historical research seems better served by DNA sequencing than by sifting through boxed letters in a dusty archives, the concerns of Possession might indeed seem retrograde.

Hell. This isn't working at all. All right, one more shot before bed.

Neil LaBute manages to eviscerate Possession, a quite good book by A.S. Byatt, of most of its virtues in his attempt to make a movie out of it. This is understandable. Byatt's wonderful epistolary ventriloquism, in which two figures, who sound very much like real nineteenth-century poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle in the film), are traced in a secret affair by two characters who sound very much like convincing late-eighties academics (Aaron Eckhart and the inevitable Gwyneth Paltrow), would be really hard to do justice to onscreen. One sort of expected most of the verbal fireworks of Randolph and Christabel's letters to be absent from the film. And that an imaginative filmmaker would find visual and other counterparts to their effects.

Or not. LaBute has replaced just about everything he couldn't work with in Byatt with an amazingly shallow and appallingly dull concoction of his own. His major innovation: change one of the two modern characters from an articulate English scholar on the down-and-out into a hunky, devil-may-care American who talks like he's never read a book and dresses like...well, let's just say that J.Crew ought to have thrown in some major product-placement cash. Eckhart's version of Byatt's Roland is based on George Clooney-senstive-tough-guy charm that would be great in a movie about... I dunno, a heroic fireman who has to save Thanksgiving from terrorists.

Not that Eckhart's I'm-the-laidback-American-foil-to-all-you-uptight-Brits act is what sinks the movie. No, if the rest of the film were any good, this would simply be forgiveable pandering to the U.S., and acceptable homage to the axiom that Some of the Actors Should Be Intensely Attractive. But LaBute's Possession, alas, is so dull that even Jennifer Ehle's seductive smile can't save it. Not that she's given much of a chance. The Victorian characters in an Edward Gorey sketch have more depth than what the script gives Ehle and Northam, as the tortured nineteenth-c. lovers. They're ciphers wearing bustles and long coats.

The modern lead characters get more screen time but are just as insubstantial: we have the uncomfortable experience of being able to predict everything they say to one another, while simultaneously noticing that they've been provided with no discernable motivations for doing anything. We don't know why Roland likes these poets (at least Paltrow's Maud has a briefly-sketched academic persona), or why (as he often insists) he "needs to know" what happened to them. This is screenwriting at its most pathetic: can't manufacture any suspense? Then have one of the characters insist that he's positively immersed in the narrative!

LaBute tries to gain a sense of magic through a few clever cuts between Victorian and present-day characters in the same scene, but these attempts at cinematic verve can't prop up this misbegotten, lifeless waste of time.

There, I think that's about right.

Posted by BT at August 19, 2002 01:22 AM