Love in a cold climate

It must have been LaBute's intention that the sections of the movie dealing with Christabel and Ash are the most vivid and most deeply romantic. Northam, who can be wonderful or woodenly self-conscious, is at his best here -- he shields his poet's heart with a businesslike Victorian reserve, but he always lets you hear it beating. And Ehle's Christabel is quietly sensational: With her prim smile and mischievously glittering eyes, she captures the essence of a difficult and intelligent woman who freely chooses a passionate and open life, fully aware that it's bound to bring her only sorrow.

Their scenes together are less uneasily electric than those between Eckhart and Paltrow -- the current between them is more like rushing water than the sizzle (or fizzle) of connecting wires. They're the picture of a certain romantic ideal that's wholly organic in its perfection and intensity -- but even if, technically, they're human stand-ins for the lushest ideas of the Victorian age, the movie makes sure we believe in them as people, too.

LaBute -- an American and a Mormon -- approaches England as a polite outsider, and it works. Parts of the picure are set in Yorkshire, and LaBute and cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier offer us an affectionate and clear-eyed view of the English countryside and its people. In one of the movie's most understated jokes, a crisp young Yorkshire innkeeper patiently listens to Roland and Maud's protestations that they're colleagues and simply must have separate rooms by responding drily, "I'm sure it's more complicated than I can imagine."

LaBute's production designer, Luciana Arrighi ("Howard's End"), gives us settings drenched in rich, muted plums and browns, occasionally shot through with golden Pre-Raphaelite touches. And LaBute finds simple, breathtakingly effective ways of connecting the Victorian-era story with the present-day one: As Roland and Maud rush down a country road in a modern car and disappear from view, a 19th-century locomotive puffs into sight along the ridge above them, headed in the opposite direction.

"Possession" is the type of richly resonant movie that Karel Reisz should have made from John Fowles' ominously vibrant and romantic "The French Lieutenant's Woman" but didn't. LaBute approaches his material both intelligently and intuitively, fully aware of the idea that a movie version of a novel is always a newly created world.

That can be a thankless job for any filmmaker. When it comes to bringing books to the screen, the critic Robin Wood has noted, "There is no such thing as a faithful adaptation." According to Wood, the idea of faithful adaptation implies that "film is the inferior art, and should be content (or even proud) to reproduce precisely what it can never hope to reproduce: the movement of the author's words on paper."

LaBute knew he couldn't represent that movement, and didn't even try. Instead, he chose to work in a kind of vernacular shorthand that feels modern and emotionally direct -- he doesn't shrink from passion where it's called for.

As Roland and Maud, making up after a tiff and moving closer to enjoying their first real kiss as lovers (there has been an earlier one, but it doesn't really count), Roland looks at her intently and explains, "I just want to see if there's an 'us' in 'you and me.'"

In the audience I saw the movie with, a few people tittered, perhaps embarrassed by the sheer "movieness" of the line. But for Roland and Maud, in so many ways more constricted than their Victorian counterparts, the line is its own kind of fervent and deeply felt poetry -- a sentence that's Victorian in timbre if not in eloquence. By the end of the movie, Maud and Roland have fallen in love slowly, carefully, tentatively, as modern lovers so often do, negotiating every possible contingency and pitfall in advance. They may be less tortured than their Victorian friends, and yet somehow they're sadder for not being able to rush at love headlong.

Even so, we walk away from the movie with some fragile hopefulness for their future. Christabel and Ash may have had a love that extended beyond the grave, but in life, it took months and torrents of words before they found the courage to touch fingertips. Even timeless love has to start out tentatively, shakily -- maybe that's the jarring needed to set the clock's hands in perpetual motion.

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