Possession, 2002.
Directed by Neil LaBute.
Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle and Lena Headey.
SYNOPSIS:
Roland’s discovery of an undiscovered letter of a famous poet changes the course of his life – and scholarship. It leads him to Maud, an expert on a hitherto unconnected poet. They retrace the Victorian bards’ lives and footsteps in a race against other academics to discover the result of those letters – and the will-they-won’t-they relationship between the two scholars.
This is a story that I have mixed feelings on because it involves ideas in my own writing. I am both drawn to it for that similarity, but then annoyed as it does not go where I would have hoped. I suspect all lovers of this or any book share this in essence, when it comes to adaptation. We are all crafters of our idea of how the story should be, and we have to watch someone else’s interpretation.
Did American Neil LaBute have the right to take this much loved English highbrow novel by A.S. Byatt into a Hollywood blockbuster?
According to LaBute’s director’s commentary, Warner were after the rights to the book the year it won the Booker prize. But it took 12 years to make, with various people being attached then unattached. So why did LaBute’s presence and script get the green light where others had not?
He says he’s a fan of the book, and perhaps he should feel he as much right to his admiration of the book and his vision of it as a film as the next director. Scrolling through online reviews, it’s clear that both book and film have fans among those enjoying simply a passionate love mystery. (I have discussed the elitism of the book on Associated Content).
This film goes too fast and I believe it must have been a longer film, now shorn too far. Note to filmmakers – do not assume a 90 minute film is more successful and palatable to an audience and put pressure on filmmakers to make shorter features. We need, as a viewer, to be satisfied by the film, and I think that few stories are truly told in under two hours. Surely the kind of audience interested in Possession would wish for a film that was also erudite and thoughtful, which may also mean longer?
Making Roland (Eckhart) an American felt like a conscious effort to woo an American audience – which apparently it is not. But what director Neil LaBute saw as transatlantic tensions, for me felt like clichéd commercialism. I wonder if some of LaBute’s thoughts are reflected in the comment by Roland to an Englishman: ‘What’s your problem with Americans?’ Were those silly obvious remarks about Roland’s nationality paraphrases of LaBute’s experience? Did LaBute also attempt to deal with international feelings when Maud (Paltrow) criticises Roland for taking the letters – as Americans assume everything is their right? But the film plays down that American Professor Mortimer Cropper wants to take all the special acquisitions they find to the US. In the book, the drive of the rivalry and chase is to keep British treasures in our own country. Yes I am aware of the Elgin marbles and I know we have the Rosetta Stone and did have the Stone of Scone. I do feel countries should retain their own treasures, though I know British and Irish architecture have been shipped West – and that makes me mad.
Changing Roland’s nationality does nothing for the film; and there was an interesting American character – Leonora Stern – who was finally cut from the film, whom I missed. I felt that by cutting Roland and Maud’s lovers, we loose some of the parallel between them and their research interests.
As Sight and Sound’s review points out, in changing Roland’s personality, you change an important point of the story. The dynamic of a shy moley man with a woman on more money and with more confidence is important. Whereas Val chose the reverse – she ends up with the rich, confidence male lawyer. And Maud, who had been wooed by successful Fergus Wolfe, chooses Roland instead to fall in love with.
In my first recent re-viewing of the film, I thought that the letters and poems of the book came through. Now I have finished the book and rewatched the film, with and without director’s commentary. My view has changed – too much of the poetry and letters have gone.
This novel is difficult to translate because words are so important to it; and poems do not translate to imagery; the nature and order of the words are so important. Expressions of an actor do not convey all we need to know – another prevalent misconception.
I wondered if the Mesulina might have been interesting to film – or would that seem too bizarre? Perhaps that too is interesting – that myths on the page are absurd when made actual.
I felt that the movie Scooby doo-ed the literary novel, but the cartoon mystery team is there in Byatt. Cropper does grave rob; he and Fergus are simply enemies; Lord Bailey does tell Fergus to get off the line and hold a gun to him and Cropper. But the silliness came in the fight between Roland and Cropper. In the book, a great wind prevents Cropper escaping, which is far better.
The ending is as it is in the book, and I hadn’t expected that coda about Ash (Northam) meeting his child – I assumed it must be Hollywood-sation.
I felt that there was not enough of the relationships. We needed to see more of Blanche (Headey) and Christabel (Ehle), for as LaBute says in his commentary, we never see them as happy and pre-Ash. I wondered in the novel whether they were lesbians as we’d understand them or if their relationship was closer to that of Ash and Ellen – an non physical companionship. The novel is very vague about Christabel’s “shared solitary existence” and I never found a point where she tells Ash about Blanche. Her suicide note is also important as it links to her belief on séances and that her death was not the end of her, but only of an unhappy earthy existence.
Like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), I never believed in a short adulterous affair that could last in the lover’s minds so long. Its short duration is what made it special; for fires go out – that kind of love rarely lasts and gives the kind of steady satisfaction that Blanche and Ellen’s companionship brought. I didn’t like the coldness of Christabel and contrasted her hardness with the sparkling eyes of Ehle when she played Eliza Bennet. She turned off all sparkle here to be an calculating adulterer, not caring who she hurt.
We did not see enough of that first meeting: the party and séance discussion that were ‘extraordinary’ as in the first draft of Ash’s letter.
The séance is far more dramatic in the book and I though it would be good to have it so on screen – where Ash is angry it seems due to the farcical nature of a séance, but we believe it is because his child has been murdered by its mother.
I was also sorry that the symbolism of going into the garden and the cats was missed out of the film; and that Roland is finally able to write his own poetry and gets a lectureship at the end.
I found myself wanting to like the film more than I could. Having just seen sweeping, high brow Italian I Am Love (2009), I wonder how a European director might have tackled Byatt’s book and kept more of the intelligence and power.
Elspeth Rushbrook
www.myspace.com/elspethr
Originally published April 27, 2010. Updated April 10, 2018.
