Love in a cold climate

Hardcore LaBute fans may find "Possession" an oddity at the very least and a betrayal of his talents at worst. But "Possession" marks the first time LaBute has wrapped a picture in any kind of warmth -- which may sound strange, considering it's a very carefully made picture that is at least partly about English reserve and caution when it comes to love. But in some ways, the sleek warmth of "Possession" is more immediately appealing than the burled wordiness of the book. (Byatt's book is brilliant, but it contains a few too many examples of the author's pitch-perfect re-creations of Victorian-era poetry -- she works what starts out as a wonderful, gorgeous, multi-hued tapestry of a joke into a threadbare carpet.)

One of Byatt's subjects in "Possession" (she gets around to it eventually and indirectly) is the inedequacy of words to plumb the depths of real passion. LaBute puts that idea squarely at the center of his movie, showing us how Maud and Roland negotiate their love gingerly and cautiously, while the Victorians, after testing the waters with a few carefully phrased letters, plunge right in. Because they know the full power of words, the poets are more hardnosed about the limitations of those words; the academics, on the other hands, know only words -- signifiers of feelings instead of, as the Victorian poets would have had it, messengers that allow those feelings to take wing.

That's a fairly subtle idea for a motion picture, but LaBute gently and unobtrusively guides his performers to the heart of it. Paltrow's Maud Bailey is a crisp, no-nonsense academic at a small English university who seems to be making her way through her life and her work with an efficient clickety-clack -- her specialty is women's studies, and the poems of Christabel LaMotte are a special interest, partly because Bailey herself is distantly related to the poet.

Eckhart's Roland (whose specialty in this his-and-hers mix is the poet Ash) is much further down on the academic food chain -- he's a lowly researcher who's constantly short of funds. He contacts Maud, seeking her advice and counsel on the secret love letter he's found. When she meets him at the train station, the first we see of her is a pair of extremely soft, extremely tasteful and extremely expensive low-heeled black boots: Maud Bailey is not one of those stereotypically scattered, frizzy-haired, mother-hen academics, but one whose approach to everything she does is as tightly wound and controlled as her long golden hair, which is always (for reasons the movie, like the book, explains) wrapped in a tight little bun.

Paltrow plays Maud with so much coolness that she holds us, and not just Roland, at arm's length for much of the movie. But it's what makes the gradual, almost pointillistic way in which she opens up to Roland that much more believable. Eckhart, in a beautifully shaded performance, plays Roland not as an unlikably brash American but as a ruggedly expressive one -- in other words, the kind of American who isn't distasteful to Englishpeople but who is still decidedly and unequivocally foreign. Badly shaven, his hair perpetually standing up as if he's just yanked a polo-neck over his head, he's so raffish and casual that you almost wonder how he found his way into the midst of all these English academics and their flowery poets to begin with.

But as Eckhart reveals them to us, Roland's most deeply American qualities serve the story precisely. That he's a stranger in a strange land (his dedication as an academic makes him belong in this setting, but his Americanness sets him forever apart) is a metaphor for how foreign we sometimes feel to ourselves when we're falling in love.

Eckhart and Paltrow play their gradual coming together with a kind of prickly unease that's both frustrating and pleasurable, as well as wholly believable. Paltrow may be one of those rare American actresses who's more believable as an Englishwoman: Her slow, reserved smile, and that shy and coltish way she has of bowing her head (like a girl who believes she's too tall to pass through any doorway), are the qualities that make her most touching here.

Roland and Maud's meeting is the beginning of an adventure in which they track down the complete cache of letters exchanged between Christabel and Ash (she is always referred to by her first name, and he by his last). Their search for the truth of the poets' relationship is hampered by Sir George (Graham Crowden), a crotchety old man who believes the letters belong to him; Cropper (Trevor Eve, in a performance that's both suitably oily and dried-out), an acquisitive American academic who's more interested in the trappings of Ash's life than in his actual work; and Roland's boss, Blackadder (Tom Hickey), a scattered but benign scholar who has buried himself in the minutiae of Ash's life and letters.

Next Page: While the Victorians surrender to the power of love, we moderns sit and think about it

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