Accused of misogyny due to the vicious nature of his early movies, Neil LaBute confounds expectations yet again with his gentle if extremely laboured adaptation of A.S. Byatt's Booker prize winning novel. LaBute favourite Aaron Eckhart plays Roland, a long suffering American scholar of the poet Sir Randolph Ash (played in flashback by Jeremy Northam). One afternoon, he makes a potentially explosive discovery when he happens across some love letters that Ash appears to have written to fellow Victorian intellectual Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). Determined to learn the truth, Roland enlists the aid of LaMotte scholar, the emotionally sterile Maud Bailey (Paltrow) and together they set out to try and piece together the relationship between the two poets.
Sounds like a real barrel of laughs, doesn't it? In truth, Possession is an earnest and well made affair, but it lacks any sort of bite. The emotional impact of Byatt's lyrical prose has been distilled somewhat by the strange adaptation - Roland's nationality has been changed to American for no discernible reason other than to drill home the class divide theme - while LaBute's direction seems uncharacteristically forced. It's honourable enough stuff, but by God, is it dull.
