Film 'possesses' romance with fantasies

If a film has writer/director Neil LaBute's fingerprints on it, then relationships are going to be an issue. In his films, fantasies are often played out. They might be fantasies based on revenge or lust or they might be a complete, total disconnection from reality. In LaBute's new film, "Possession," the main characters see one fantasy play out from a distant past to come in touch with their own feelings.\nThe film, adapted liberally from an A.S. Byatt novel, stars LaBute mascot Aaron Eckhart as Roland Michell, an American scholar working in London. Michell, fascinated by Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), steals some paper wedged inside an Ash book that looks like a love letter to a woman other than Ash's wife and bears Ash's handwriting.\nMaud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a prim professor and expert on poetess Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). When Michell approaches Bailey and asks for information on LaMotte and then shows her the letter, the two then set off essentially as literary detectives to try to figure out whether there is a connection between Ash and LaMotte.\nAs they journey to the places where Ash and LaMotte ventured -- the film at times serves as a pretty travelogue of the British Isles -- they practically inhabit the old poets as they become windows into their own souls.\nLaBute not only juggles both period and modern-day romances, but he does it with his usual wit. His good guys and bad guys are more defined, and while his best film, 1998's "Your Friends and Neighbors," was so good because even the people you were rooting for had major problems worse than yours, this film works because Michell and Bailey aren't perfect and because LaBute can prove that the concept of love hasn't changed too much over time.\nEckhart is wild-eyed without being stupid or overly brash. Paltrow, as anybody who saw her Oscar-winning work in "Shakespeare in Love" can attest, can handle a British accent and give personality to a character who would be overwhelmed by clichéd propriety in the wrong actress' hands. Northam and Ehle serve period romance well.\nAs you see these two couples play out their relationships, you realize that some fantasies are worth the risks.