Possession

After debuting in 1997 with a cruel drama of corporate and sexual politics ('In the Company of Men'), shortly followed by a hard-hitting study of contemporary relationships ('Your Friends and Neighbours') and an action/comedy about a traumatised murder witness convinced that she is a character in her favourite soap opera ('Nurse Betty'), with hindsight it seems inevitable that writer/director Neil Labute's next project would be an adaptation of a period novel - inevitable, given that LaBute always comes up with surprises.

'Possession', adapted from A.S. Byatt's novel of the same name, begins with Roland Michell (LaBute's old protege Aaron Eckhart), an American research assistant in the British Museum, accidentally discovering an unsent love letter from Victorian poet laureate Randolph Henry Ash to poetess Christabel LaMotte. Determined to uncover their relationship, Roland joins forces with a LaMotte relative and expert, Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow). Pursuing a thread of half-clues in diaries, letters and poems, the obsessive pair discovers that the progress of the Victorians' affair has uncanny parallels with their own developing relationship.

No doubt there will be fans of Byatt's original novel who will resent LaBute's decision to have the quintessentially English Maud played by an American actress, and to make Roland an American character. Such objections are, however, unwarranted. Paltrow is as excellent as ever in an English role; and by making his male protagonist an outsider, LaBute manages to address contemporary anxieties about Anglo-American relations, and also to dramatise the tensions in his own status as an American handler and interpreter of English materials (just like his Roland).

Really LaBute should be applauded for having carried off a nearly impossible task - transforming a highly literary work about words and texts into a decidedly visual, cinematic experience. He does this by fluidly intercutting and offsetting scenes of scholarly reading and writing - scenes which would be intrinsically uninteresting on screen without some relief - with images of Ash and LaMotte (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle) together.

Again, admirers of Byatt's novel may be annoyed that LaBute has reduced the Victorian characters to little more than beautiful yet cliched figures from pre-Raphaelite paintings; but it is a central idea of the film that people are unknowable beyond the texts which they leave behind, and the stylised presentation of LaBute's Victorians reinforces this idea, by suggesting that Ash and LaMotte can only be imagined (at least by Roland and Maud) in terms of paintings from the time - or in terms of other movies about the time, like 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', to which 'Possession' refers visually on several occasions.

'Possession' does have its faults. At times it seemed a little, well, uninspired, especially in the scenes where Roland and Maud confront their academic rivals; and the final revelations were just a little too contrived for my tastes. Still, LaBute proves that he remains a highly accomplished director even when entering territory more often associated with Merchant-Ivory; and academic research has never looked so fun.

Anton Bitel