Grade: B

Verdict: Not "possessed" enough, despite its talented director and cast.

Details: Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. Directed by Neil LaBute. Rated PG-13 for sexuality and adult themes. One hour, 32 minutes. Limited release

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Review: Neil LaBute's new movie, "Possession," starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, oddly echoes "The French Lieutenant's Woman," Karel Reitz's 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Both are based on popular prize-winning novels that are similarly resistant to the transition from page to screen. Both have prestigious casts. Both face the challenge of integrating a modern love story and a historical one. Both feature fine performances, sensitive direction and gorgeous countryside.

And both are honorable failures. "Possession" is certainly worth seeing — it's the class act to close the summer — but the film misses some crucial charge, an innate energy that was in the book that didn't translate to the movie. You could call it genteel. You could also call it too restrained.

The picture, like A.S. Byatt's intricate novel, is a romance wrapped inside a literary mystery. In present-day England, two scholars (Paltrow and Eckhart), become obsessed with finding out what — if anything — happened more than a century ago between Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), Queen Victoria's poet laureate, and Christobel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), a lesser-known poet whose feminist themes have made her big in women's studies. (Both characters are fictional creations of Byatt's.)

Eckhart, LaBute's leading man of choice, plays Roland Michell, a cocky American studying in London and working as a research assistant to an esteemed professor who's an expert on Ash. Sounds glamorous, but Roland mostly spends his days combing through index cards, looking for how many gooseberry jams Ash gave his wife in 1850. "This is not a job for a grown-up," he mutters.

Then, by accident, he discovers several letters hidden in the back pages of a book. They appear to be love letters sent by Ash to LaMotte; but an essential part of the Ash legend is that he was famously faithful to his wife. If the letters are authentic, Roland will become a sensation in academic circles.

Roland seeks out Maud Bailey (Paltrow), a brilliant but aloof academic who specializes in La Motte. At first, she thinks the possibility of an affair between the two is preposterous. That LaMotte was such an unconventional Victorian woman — no men, no children and fully committed to another woman — is essential to understanding her poetry. But Maud is hooked in spite of herself. Joining Roland in his sleuthing, the two trace the footsteps of these unlikely secret lovers all over England and even to Europe.

To that end, the movie shifts back and forth between the present-day literary detectives and the poets' troubled romance. If they are discovered, it would create a scandal. But they are irresistibly drawn to each other, by a passion for words as much as a sexual passion. In one of her early letters, LaMotte writes, "I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best part of me."

At times, the past/present parallels work beautifully. The movie reminds us how the past is always present. You get a slight tingle when LaBute cuts between the two couples standing next to the same waterfall. He also captures the drizzly romanticism of the English countryside, with its drenched green fields and imposing mansions. Finally, his interest in and acute understanding of matters of gender, laid out so expertly in his first film, "In the Company of Men," makes him an especially good fit for this material.

What LaBute can't do is communicate the sheer sexiness of pursuing esoteric academic minutiae. Byatt could do it, because words are what she has. But LaBute not only must invent a visual correlative, but he also has to find some way to give the characters' infatuation with language a dimensionality. He pulls it off as well as anyone possibly could, but it's something of an unattainable goal.

Paltrow's familiar greyhound elegance and fragile reserve make her perfect casting for Maud, a woman who's allowed her studies to cut her off from life. And Elkhart is a revelation. Typically cast by LaBute as an unfeeling brute or nasty conniver, he makes a wonderful romantic hero, even if his two-day beard makes him look like the last five Tom Cruise magazine covers.

The other lovers fare less well. Northam is one of the best actors working — remember him in "Emma" with Paltrow? But he projects a certain rationality. He's doesn't bring the unfettered impetuousness that Ralph Fiennes (rumored as an early choice) might have.

Ehle is a far bigger problem. Again, she's good enough, but her line readings are nothing special and she's given too many scenes where she just stands there, smiling enigmatically. It probably doesn't help that her broad brow, distinctive nose and slightly hooded eyes suggest Streep. (Ehle even walks along a sea wall in a hooded cape, as Streep did in "The French Lieutenant's Woman.")

LaBute deserves a lot of credit for attempting something as unabashedly and sincerely romantic as "Possession." There's not a hint of his trademark misanthropy here, and his own mad crush on words (so evident in his plays and screenplays) is perfectly attuned to Byatt's book. "Possession" is definitely worth checking out, if only for a respite from the tumult of so many other summer movies. But it's not — and I don't think this is a Victorian term — the slam-dunk we expected.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution