Taglines: The past will connect them. The passion will possess them.
Possession movie storyline. Roland Michell is an American scholar trying to make it in the difficult world of British Academia. He has yet to break out from under his mentor’s shadow until he finds a pair of love letters that once belonged to one of his idols, a famous Victorian poet. Michell, after some sleuthing, narrows down the suspects to a woman not his wife, another well known Victorian poet.
Roland enlists the aid of a Dr. Maud Bailey, an expert on the life of the woman in question. Together they piece together the story of a forbidden love affair, and discover one of their own. They also find themselves in a battle to hold on to their discovery before it falls into the hands of their rival, Fergus Wolfe.
Possession is a 2002 British-American romantic mystery drama film written and directed by Neil LaBute and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle, Lena Headey, Holly Aird, Georgia Mackenzie, Anna Massey, Christopher Good and Toby Stephens. It is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by British author A. S. Byatt, who won the Booker Prize for it the year it was published.
Three early drafts of the film’s screenplay were written by American playwright David Henry Hwang in the 1990s, but the project languished in pre-production for years. Directors such as Sydney Pollack and Gillian Armstrong worked on the film and eventually gave up before LaBute became director. LaBute made drastic changes to the story, based partially on notes that original author Byatt had made on earlier drafts of the screenplay, as she recognized that Roland Michell had to “exist on screen” in a different way than he did in the book.
LaBute recalled: “What she basically said was, ‘This is Roland on the page; you must make him different in a film!’ She got that Roland needed more drive. Just seeing those notes kind of gave me the keys to the kingdom. And so in the film, Roland keeps making these wild, imaginative leaps about the poets’ lives, and Maud’s both charmed and appalled.”
LaBute changed Roland’s nationality from British to American, and made him more brash and active. He denied that this was “shameless pandering to the audience….in part, it was [just] more comfortable for me to write Roland that way.”
Possession (2002)
Directed by: Neil LaBute
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle, Lena Headey, Holly Aird, Georgia Mackenzie, Anna Massey, Christopher Good, Toby Stephens
Screenplay by: David Henry Hwang, Laura Jones, Neil LaBute
Production Design by: Luciana Arrighi
Cinematography by: Jean-Yves Escoffier
Film Editing by: Claire Simpson
Costume Design by: Jenny Beavan
Set Decoration by: Ian Whittaker
Art Direction by: Paul Ghirardani, Andrew Sanders, Su Whitaker
Music by: Gabriel Yared
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexuality and some thematic elements.
Distributed by: Focus Features (USA), Warner Bros. Pictures (International)
Release Date: August 30, 2002
Views: 135
