This setup from A.S. Byatt’s 1990 Booker Prize–winning novel would seem like the last premise in the world to attract director Neil LaBute, whose In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors were about hard-edged modern sexual warfare. But look again at the romantic fantasies in his overlooked Nurse Betty (2000), about a housewife in love with a soap opera character and a killer in love with a photograph of the housewife, and you will see the same premise: Love, fueled by imagination, tries to leap impossible divides.
The film, written by David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones and LaBute, uses a flashback structure to move between the current investigation and the long-ago relationship. Jeremy Northam plays Ash, an upright public figure, and Jennifer Ehle is Christabel, a pre-Raphaelite beauty who lives with the darkly sensuous Blanche Glover (Lena Headey). The nature of their relationship is one of the incidental fascinations of the movie: At a time before lesbianism was widely acknowledged, female couples were commonly accepted and the possibility of a sexual connection didn’t necessarily occur. Blanche is the dominant and possessive one, and Christabel is perhaps not even essentially lesbian, but simply besotted with friendship. When she and Ash make contact, it is Blanche, not Ash’s unbending wife, who is the angered spouse.
In the way it moves between two couples in two periods, Possession is like Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981). That film, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, added a modern couple that didn’t exist in the John Fowles novel, and had both couples played by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. The notion of two romances on parallel trajectories is common to both films, and intriguing because there seem to be insurmountable barriers in both periods.
Ash and Christabel are separated by Victorian morality, his marriage and her relationship. The moderns, Maud and Roland, seem opposed to any idea of romance; she has her own agenda, and he is reticent to a fault. “You have nothing to fear from me,” he tells her early on, because he avoids relationships. Later, when they find themselves tentatively in each other’s arms, he pulls back: “We shouldn’t be doing this; it’s dangerous.” This might be convincing if Roland and Maud looked like our conventional idea of literary scholars: Mike White, perhaps, paired with Lili Taylor. That they are both so exceptionally attractive is distracting; Paltrow is able to project a certain ethereal bookishness, but a contemporary man with Eckhart’s pumped-up physique and adamant indifference to Paltrow would be read by many observers as gay. That he is not—that his reticence is a quirk rather than a choice—is a screenplay glitch we have to forgive.
We do, because the movie is not a serious examination of scholarship or poetry, but a brainy romance. In a world where most movie romances consist of hormonal triggers and plumbing procedures, it’s sexy to observe two couples who think and debate their connections, who quote poetry to each other, who consciously try to enhance their relationships by seeking metaphors and symbols they can attach to. Romance defined by the body will decay with the flesh, but romance conceived as a grand idea—ah, now that can still fascinate people a century later.
LaBute is a director who loves the spoken word. No surprise that between movies he writes and directs plays. I suspect he would be incapable of making a movie about people who had nothing interesting to say to one another. What he finds sexy is not the simple physical fact of two people, but the scenario they write around themselves; look at the way the deaf woman in In the Company of Men so completely defeats both men by discovering their ideas of themselves and turning those ideas against them. By the end of the movie, with the egos of both men in shards at her feet, the woman seems more desirable than we could have imagined possible.
What happens in Possession is not the same, but it is similar enough to explain LaBute’s interest in the story. He likes people who think themselves into and out of love, and finds the truly passionate (like Blanche) to be the most dangerous. He likes romances that exist out of sight, denied, speculated about, suspected, fought against. Any two people can fall into each other’s arms and find that they enjoy the feeling. But to fall into someone else’s mind—now that can be dangerous.
Pride and Prejudice
PG, 127 m., 2005
Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Bennet), Matthew Macfayden (Darcy), Brenda Blethyn (Mrs. Bennet), Donald Sutherland (Mr. Bennet), Simon Woods (Charles Bingley), Rupert Friend (Lieutenant Wickham), Tom Hollander (William Collins), Rosamund Pike (Jane Bennet), Jena Malone (Lydia Bennet), Judi Dench (Lady Catherine), Carey Mulligan (Kitty Bennet), Talulah Riley (Mary Bennet). Directed by Joe Wright and produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Paul Webster. Screenplay by Deborah Moggach, based on the book by Jane Austen.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Everybody knows the first sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. But the chapter ends with a truth equally acknowledged about Mrs. Bennet, who has five daughters in want of husbands: “The business of her life was to get her daughters married.” Romance seems so urgent and delightful in Austen because marriage is a business, and her characters cannot help treating it as a pleasure. Pride & Prejudice is the best of her novels because its romance involves two people who were born to be in love, and who care not about business, pleasure, or each other. It is frustrating enough when one person refuses to fall in love, but when both refuse, we cannot rest until they kiss.
Of course all depends on who the people are. When Dorothea marries the Reverend Casaubon in Eliot’s Middlemarch, it is a tragedy. She marries out of consideration and respect, which is all wrong; she should have married for money, always remembering that where money is, love often follows, since there is so much time for it. The crucial information about Mr. Bingley, the new neighbor of the Bennet family, is that he “has” an income of four or five thousand pounds a year. One never earns an income in these stories, one has it, and Mrs. Bennet (Brenda Blethyn) has her sights on it.
Her candidate for Mr. Bingley’s hand is her eldest daughter, Jane; it is orderly to marry the girls off in sequence, avoiding the impression that an older one has been passed over. There is a dance, to which Bingley brings his friend Darcy. Jane and Bingley immediately fall in love, to get them out of the way of Darcy and Elizabeth, who is the second Bennet daughter. These two immediately dislike each other. Darcy is overheard telling his friend Bingley that Elizabeth is “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” The person who overhears him is Elizabeth, who decides she will “loathe him for all eternity.” She is advised within the family circle to count her blessings: “If he liked you, you’d have to talk to him.”
These are the opening moves in Joe Wright’s new film Pride & Prejudice, one of the most delightful and heartwarming adaptations made from Austen or anybody else. Much of the delight and most of the heart comes from Keira Knightley, who plays Elizabeth as a girl glowing in the first light of perfection. She is beautiful, she has opinions, she is kind but can be unforgiving. “They are all silly and ignorant like other girls,” says her father in the novel, “but Lizzie has something more of quickness than her sisters.”