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Possession Directed by Neil LaBute Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle, Lena Headley, Holly Aird From the novel by A.S. Byatt. Reviewed by H. W. Moss It is difficult to say exactly why “Possession,” a serious, high minded and sophisticated dual love story with sometimes witty dialogue, fails to hit its target, but there are several reasons. Granted, the course the story travels is a difficult route to navigate, taking place at once in two separate centuries. Yet beyond the disjointed plot line, it is also partly the fault of the actors, which ultimately means the director did not have a good grip on his talent or his script. “Possession” bounces between Victorian England and present day London and segues back and forth with sometimes disconcerting results. A door in a room will close in the past only to pop open in the present. The same steam engine running on a railway is viewed by people in different historical periods. Except in “Star Trek,” time warps are chancy maneuvers and they don’t always work. “Possession’s” story in the present involves a young American scholar, Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), who visits the London Library and discovers two pages of a hitherto unknown letter written by fictional poet laureate to Queen Victoria, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam). Penned in 1859, the letter refers to Ash’s admiration for a woman other than his wife, Ellen (Holly Aird). But this would be sacrilege to Ash scholars because his love for Ellen was pure. Ash would never have strayed nor wooed another woman. With stolen originals in hand (he could have just copied them, you know), Michell sets out to substantiate his thesis, that Ash not only met but slept with the poetess Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). That seems quite unlikely to Professor Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), a distant relation to LaMotte who has made a career of LaMotte’s life, because, you see, LaMotte was a lesbian. But Bailey is willing to give this unscrupulous American scholar access to her literary archives and together they begin a search for clues that eventually brings them into one another’s arms and explains more about the Ash/LaMotte liaison than we really wanted to know. “The Red Violin” (1998) covered four centuries and accomplished a similar time traveling feat, interconnecting a present day tale with several taking place in the past, but did so masterfully. For one thing, there was a central mystery in that film which was an important element of the plot. There is a mystery in “Possession” but it does not surface or become of interest to the viewer until well near the end. Furthermore, its resolution never gains the level of importance to either love story, the one taking place in the present or the one in the past, as the mystery did in “Violin.” “Possession’s” failure could also be due in part to the esoteric realm the present day characters inhabit. They are aspiring academics and tenured professors dwelling in the dusty dungeon-like atmosphere of museum basements or college office chambers. They spend their days pouring over the letters and diaries, the long hidden and sometimes secret thoughts of historically important and unimportant peripheral personalities, or attend auctions of these artifacts in hopes of acquiring something rare in order to further their carreers. It is not just that the realm of literary arcana is dull, dreary and boring, the film doesn’t make us care whether or not these people succeed in rooting out a find or beating their colleagues to it. Nor do the actors give this their best performances. Paltrow dons a vaguely upper crust British accent but simply is not convincing nor particularly exciting. She moves with curiosity through her role as if she did not have a clear back story, the reasons which might have caused her character to take a specific career path. Meanwhile, Eckhart is an American with a three day growth on his face who doesn’t shower or change clothes and hardly seems to be someone this beautiful English history professor would go for in a man. He’s more like a scruffy mongrel she picked up off the street and let sleep on her apartment floor. Ehle, who resembles a chubby faced Meryl Streep, plays the poetess LaMotte with equally unclear motivations. LaMotte has a jealous but steadfast lover, a painter named Blanche Glover (Lena Headey) none of whose work survived to the present day, yet she takes off for a four week vacation in Yorkshire with Ash like some kind of literary groupie. Tracking their 150-year-old tryst in the present becomes the modus for getting Michell and Bailey to rent the same room in the B ‘n’ B Ash occupied which is where a door closes on the past and opens in the present. However, it was patently absurd to think that in the present day the same route to Yorkshire could be recovered even if that darn steam engine is the same exact one Ash and LaMotte rode. As the plot begins to assert itself, a series of letters are sought which passed between Ash and LaMotte. In the past, they were flung back at Blanche by Ellen who brought them to Ash’s wife in an attempt to dampen if not kill the lovers’ fire. In the present, they may or may not exist and a New Mexico scholar named Cropper (Trevor Eve with a convincing American accent) attempts to gain their possession, which is one potential meaning for the title. “Possession’s” characters have an insider’s knowledge of specialized literary works and their remarks can be quite clever, thus the dialogue often has more going for it than the plot. Cropper disparages his competitor Blackadder (Tom Hickey) with the comment, “He’s Irish. He enjoys being persecuted.” Another character introduces himself as, “Hildebrand Ash, man of leisure.” Other lines are equally winsome. The 1990 novel won England’s Booker Prize and it probably worked well as a piece of fiction where it is easier to shift between present day and 1850’s England. However, moving from one era to another on the page is a very different thing than attempting to do the same in a film. # # #.

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