from Victoria Magazine, August 2002
by Claire Whitcomb
It isn't often that a comment about poetry ignites a soul-scorching love affair. But in A.S. Byatt's Possession, language turns electric as soon as Randolph Ash, a happily married Victorian poet, meets the reclusive Christabel LaMotte. He inquires, casually, if she is writing Spenserian stanzas or blank verse. "I remember," he recalls, "suddenly you spoke—of the power of verse and the Life of the Language—and quite forgot to look shy or apologetic, but looked, forgive me, magnificent."
From there on, through seventy-one pages of love letters, through densely symbolic narrative poems, through lengthy, suddenly discovered diaries, the secret passion of Randolph and Christabel is pieced together by two twentieth-century scholars, these academics— buttoned-up, upper-class Maud and down-on-his-luck Roland—find themselves traveling warily, on a parallel course to romance.
Possession, a ripping good yarn, is unabashedly literate. Laden with references to Coleridge, to Norse myths, to Darwin, it is the sort of book that could easily thick a filmmaker's blood with cold, to borrow a Byatt turn of the phrase. But director Neil LaBute, best known for Nurse Betty and In the Company of Men, felt no such chill. "When I approached the producers, I was told, "This isn't really your territory," says Neil. "But it really is. It's about relationships."
For a guy who describes himself as "bigger and sloppier and more outgoing" than the English, he is as smart as a companion to Byatt as you'll find. Critics will probably have nits to pick, but Possession- the movie is a fascinating look at the problem of turning two stories set in two centuries into a two-hour tale. As Neil says, "you already like everything in the book. As a director, you have to be able to sleep as night. And A.S. Byatt has to be able to sleep at night."
In writing the screenplay, his first task was to increase the tension between the modern couple, who in the book do not head to the bedroom until the last chapter. With Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart on screen, such restraint seems highly implausible. Neil gave it credence by making Roland an American, an outsider imbued with all the awkwardness Neil remembered from his graduate student days at the Royal court Theatre. Such a change gave Neil "open season" to add psychological tension and inject the occasional un-Byatt-like line. In the middle of a "to bed or not to bed" discussion with Maud, he has Roland quote Freud: "On the other side of attraction lies compulsion." And then add, "Or was that Calvin Klein?"
A.S. Byatt welcomed the possession of her story by other imaginations. "She met the actors, watched the shooting, saw every version of the script," says Neil. Her reputation opened doors, enabling the crew to film at the London Library, where she'd written large chunks of her book. "We had to displace a few men in rumpled corduroy jackets," he recalls. Most of his conversations with Byatt took place while racing a shooting deadline—four hours at the Athenaeum Club, a day or two at the British Museum, where film crews had never before been allowed. "We didn't have time for a fireside chat on literature," he says. Not that it mattered. On the few occasions when he made a change A.S. Byatt didn't care for, he'd receive a "four- or five-paragraph, really good, academically based argument. I didn't even counter it," Neil laughs. "I just said, "You're right."
In crafting Possession, he was well served by his background in the theater (his play The Shape of Things opened on Broadway last fall). When he could, he treated the tale of four lovers as if it were a single seamless story, performed live. For instance, in one scene, the poets walk out of a hotel room in Yorkshire and close the door. Seconds later it is opened by the scholars, who have been waiting in the hall. They enter a room with new wallpaper and a modern bath, created by the old theater trick of switched sidewalls. Why not let the crew have a cup of coffee and film the scene in two takes? "You can feel a break in a film," Neil maintains. "I wanted things done in real time."
Though both sets of lovers are equally handsome, the poets nearly steal the movie. Their story, transpiring amid the rustle of taffeta and scratch of nibbed pens, is inherently more compelling. Filmed with a stunning immediacy, it unlocks what the book hides. A.S. Byatt teases out the poets' story, telling it almost entirely in letters and diaries, revealing it to the reader at the same speed it is revealed to the scholars.
The book's format, though unwieldy, allows riches that cannot be translated to film. "I am reluctant to take my pen from the paper and fold up this letter," Randolph writes to Christabel, "for as long as I write to you, I have the illusion that we are in touch." Leave me aside," Christabel pleads, "from the Rush of your intellect and power of writing—or I am a Lost Soul."
Byatt is a writer's writer, which Neil LaBute understands. He borrows one of her phrases, "to a dusty shelf we aspire," for Christabel's tombstone. "We all struggle and struggle, and we're one in a million. Though in my case," he says, "the shelf is in Blockbuster."
So if you own, Possession, dust it off. Or head to the library. The film opens August 16, and you won't want to miss what's on the cutting room floor.