Best movie of this year hands down!

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Let me start out by saying that I absolutely love the book. However, I tried to watch the movie unbiased, since even a failed adaptation might be quite enjoyable as a movie in its own right.Sadly, it wasn't.The movie had some (okay, maybe two or three) great scenes. Jeremy Northam (as Randolph Henry Ash) and especially Jennifer Ehle (as Christabel LaMotte) manage to convey intriguing characters, even with very limited time and dialogue. Too bad, though, that a movie revolving around two poets should contain so little poetry - Ash and LaMotte supposedly recognise each other as kindred minds and succumb to the power of each other's words, but what we actually see is just another pretty couple falling rather randomly in love. But whereas Northam and Ehle could still be quite believable as poets, Paltrow and Eckhart fail utterly as scholars. They do not say a single intelligent or scholarly thing. The only academic zeal they display is the occasional petty theft. They do not show any appreciation of their research subjects - Eckhart's character in particular seems too stupid to even copy-and-paste an undergraduate paper together, let alone to be the type of guy who would devote his life to the analysis of Victorian poetry. And I'm not even talking about the utter ridiculousness of Paltrow, with her perfectly plucked eyebrows and carefully applied layers of makeup, talking about her 'feminist sisters'. ...oh, Aaron Eckhart and his infuriating grin and pasted-on 'brashness' - how I wanted to punch him in the face. But I digress.Now and then, fragments of subplot can be discerned among the endless demonstrations of Paltrow and Eckhart's painful lack of chemistry. Mortimer Cropper occasionally pops up, but it is hard to tell why, since none of his brief appearances influences the main storyline in any way. (Apart from one of the final scenes of course, which I will not spoil, but here, too, he somehow conveniently disappears when it's time for Paltrow and Eckhart to steal the show again. They must have killed him off-screen, or something.) Also, a solicitor is introduced, but his function remains a mystery. The presence of these unnecessary elements is even more painful in the face of the absence of some much more obviously valuable ones - like Val, or Leonora. They could even have introduced an actual Roland, rather than two versions of Fergus Wolff! They could have used the time devoted to the useless solicitor by including some actual poetry!But, well, who needs poetry when we can have two pretty people kissing their way towards a cardboard happy ending?

Possession is a film about an American scholar working over in London for a professor who seems to have a royal high opinion of himself and he and a biographer of some 19th century British poet and who seem to feel they have exclusive custody of his legend such as it is. The poet was known for his filial devotion to his wife of many years.Our American Aaron Eckhardt however gets a hold of a letter which implies a relationship with a female poet of the same era. That particular poet is a little less known, but among her followers she has a reputation as a feminist icon and a lesbian. He goes to another scholar Gwyneth Paltrow who specializes in the feminist and they begin a hunt through both the records and the places of encounter they've documented.The romance part of Possession I get. Paltrow and Eckhardt are as civilized a pair of lovers you'll ever meet. Their romantic scenes are tastefully and exquisitely handled. So are the Victorian flashback sequences of Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. Academicians at least as I've always pictured them are in a search for the truth. Those opposing Paltrow and Eckhardt seem to have a big vested interest in keeping the images of the two poets as they've come down in history as they are. Why we the audience should care is another matter. It's kind of like The Fountainhead where some kind of popular movement is started against Howard Roarke and his ideas even though I daresay 96% of the population could give a ringy rat's rectum about architectural styles or the reputations of two 19th century poets.To put it in popular terms it would be like Abraham Lincoln scholars discovering letters showing he had a passionate affair with Clara Barton during the Civil War. Interesting and even titillating if something like that was discovered.Possession succeeds on the romantic, but kind of falls down on the realistic.

This is one of those movies that belongs in a special category: Films Worth Watching for Exactly One or Two Scenes.Really, it's crazy. Other than these two scenes, the movie is mediocre, with Gwyneth Paltrow's great beauty the best thing about it.But these two scenes! It's as if they are from another movie entirely, a movie you saw as a child and never forgot, a movie that shaped your adult love life.If only the rest of the film around these two scenes were equally as good.Here are the scenes: a man and a woman, deeply in love with each other, delay kissing, for the moment is not yet ripe. They spend time together, including collecting shells along the seashore.Finally, one candle-lit night at dinner, the woman, radiating the original Earth Goddess, smiles at the man, and that smile communicates all. He knows that this is the night. He follows her to her bedroom, where she has positioned herself -- gracefully, beautifully, sensually -- in readiness for him. His hands shake...Second scene: a man meets a little girl, and in that meeting comes to understand deep heartaches of his life in a whole new way.And ... those scenes are reason enough to see this movie. Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle are superb; the costumes are gorgeous; the lighting is perfect ...And then you have the rest of the movie. Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart play two modern scholars studying the lives of the characters played by the aforementioned, excellent, Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle.Paltrow is terrific, everything the script calls for.Aaron Eckhart ... was really good in "Company of Men." Here he just isn't enough. When Paltrow kisses him, and attempts to display passion, you are certain: she'd never go for this guy. She could get someone so much better, and she will.The script makes Eckhart's character out to be something of a boy-man. Eckhart plays him with perpetually greasy hair and unshaved face. he wears the same clothes everyday. And he's something of a nothing.But Northam and Ehle, and their story ... for the ages.

Watching Gwyneth play the insipid role of Gwyneth with her blue blood accent, and Aaron Eckhart playing a gridiron player who somehow loved nothing better than a poetry touchdown, I thought, the best one might do to salvage this tragic film would be to swap the leads over. Their Victorian counterparts were wonderful, with a depth to their portrayals utterly convincing. That said, I guess the shallow romance of the modern protagonists (as depicted by the screenplay - Byatt's writing being the superior) was perhaps best befitted by the actors who played them. Enough range in their beings to slap together a limerick perhaps, nothing more though.