Possession

A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel Possession is a heady mix of poetry, love letters, fairy tales, diary pages, and bits of criticism and theory — purely literary stuff that's always the first to go whenever a book is adapted for the screen. Unfortunately, as this thin and entirely ill-conceived adaptation from director Neil LaBute demonstrates, that stuff happens to be the lifeblood of Byatt's wonderful book. Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is a scruffy American student of Victorian poetry toiling at the British Museum as a research assistant to Professor Blackadder (Tom Hickey), one of the leading authorities on the 19th-century English poet Randolp...