By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * *)
You've heard it a hundred times and probably said it yourself: "It's a fantastic read but they could never make it into a movie".
A.S. Byatt's 500-page 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel is one such story, a literary detective tale that intercuts two love stories
between men and women of letters, one romance from Victorian times, the other from today.
Aaron Eckhart plays Roland Mitchell, one of those poor, earnest American students researching literature in London, who stumbles on a letter stuffed between the pages of a manuscript. It appears to be a love letter from a leading Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), to a woman who was not his wife.
Since Queen Victoria's poet laureate has been held up for more than a century as a model of marital fidelity, the letter is dynamite to historians. Mitchell shows it to an English expert, Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow - don't ask why they had to cast such an obviously American star), who claims to know everything about the poet.
Mitchell is remote, scared of intimacy; Bailey is suspicious of love, men and theories that might overturn the official history of her specialist subject. They set out to prove or disprove the possibility that the happily married Ash had an affair with the 19th-century feminist and lesbian, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), a beauty who lived with Blanche Glover (Lena Headey). And, as the film intercuts past and present, they tentatively move closer to each other.
All in all, not a bad setup, especially when put into the hands of Neil LaBute, the director whose first couple of films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, were about modern sexual warfare, and his third, Nurse Betty, was a romantic fantasy.
Unfortunately LaBute and his characters, particularly the women, appear more infatuated with the clothes and trappings of Victoriana than communicating the story. Perhaps, after all, that book was just too deep and multi-layered to film.
DVD features: movie (102min); commentary by director Neil Labute.
DVD, video rental: May 14
