(rated PG-13, 103 mins.)
This is the year’s most romantic movie in a summer of big blockbusters. What does it mean to risk it all? To go after something that you and those around you would normally consider foolish, dangerous or just plain – wrong. Yet, you can’t help yourself? Adapted from A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel, Possession, the movie follows the tale of Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, two modern scholars, who unearth an illicit romance between a pair of 19th-century poets (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle). Northam plays English poet Randolph Henry Ash in a secret affair with Christabel LaMotte (Ehle), a lesbian. An all consuming movie that will engulf the audience like fire. Director Neil LaBute (In The Company of Men) does an unexpected flawless job juggling the storylines of past and present weaving the deepening love between Paltrow and Eckhart while paralleling the poets. Afterall, moviegoers are used to LaBute’s in your-face-films like ‘Your Friends And Neighbors.”
