THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2002
FILM
THE UNIVERSITYDAILYKANSAN 7
'Possession'fails as an adaptation
FILM
Stephen Shupe
sshupe@kansan.com
Imagine some of the great book-tofilm adaptations — Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest reduced to campfire sessions with the original authors, reading page after page of their work. If this idea gets any juices flowing, see Neil LaBute's adaptation of A.S. Byatt's book Possession: A Romance.
A movie about sex that offers an orgy of words but little else, Possession stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart as two present-day intellectuals investigating a secret 19th century love affair. Their sleuthing involves no less a cinematic event than sorting through letters.
While researching poet Randolph Henry Ash's work in a London library, American Roland Michell (Eckhart) finds a letter Ash wrote to lesbian author Christabel LaMotte. With the help of native Maud Bailey (Paltrow), Michell unearths the tragic kinks in Ash and LaMotte's relationship.
For the film's first half-hour, you can feel LaBute — at heart a wordsmith —
searching for visual interpretations. The film wants to blanket you in familiar images of academic life: piles of unfinished work on invisible desks, late nights spent with the printed page. But LaBute gives these images a curiously stark quality, and he lacks the talent for conveying the thrill of university advancement the way, say, Ron Howard did in A Beautiful Mind.
The film begins to break off into flashbacks, in a clumsy sort of way that suggests the projectionist decided to switch to an episode of Masterpiece Theater. Here, we see Ash and LaMotte's romance play out. Or, rather, we 'hear' it play out. LaBute and his co-writers, David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones,
have written a screenplay that simply takes Byatt's lyrical prose and mats it onto film. It contains the most voice-over dialogue of any movie in recent memory.
As LaMotte, Jennifer Ehle performs with a radiant geniality that belies her character's swelling mask of contempt. Paltrow also impresses, giving every syllable a satin-pillow caress, but the men in the film fall short. Eckhart would look more at home scoring touchdowns than he would teaching lectures, and as the poet Ash, Jeremy Northam plays his usual, stunted self.
In the past, LaBute has prided himself on being a re-educator of sexual politics, in explosive films such as In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. In Possession, he wants to continue his exploration of fear and doubt among the sexes, but when the people involved look this white, overeducated and spiritually impotent, viewers tend to block out the message.
Beyond these thematic mistakes. LaBute fails even to spin a good yarn.
Possession ★★ (out of four)
Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart and Jeremy Northam Rated PG-13 for sexuality Playing at South Wind 12, 3433 Iowa St.
Rent these other film adaptations, all of which are more successful than Possession at switching genres:
Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, with Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood
James Ivory's A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, with Leeele Sobieski
Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, with Sarah Polley and Ian Holm
The film is constantly jumping from the past and present, leaving little time to develop characters or establish any emotional power. What jelled in Byatt's book comes off as overly telegraphed on the screen.