Regular Price $14.98

Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow,  Aaron Eckhart,  Jeremy Northam,  Jennifer Ehle,  Lena Headey, 
Directed By: Neil LaBute, 
Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Release Date: 2002
Studio: Universal Studios
Format: Closed-captioned,  Color,  Dolby,  DVD-Video,  Subtitled,  Widescreen,  NTSC, 

Editorial Reviews and DVD Information about Possession

Amazon.com
Modern love and classic romantic passion meet in this lush adaptation of A.S. Byatt's brilliant novel. Academics Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) and Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) are experts on the work of two different Victorian poets. As they pursue a possible connection between their subjects, the two sleuths begin to stumble toward a romance of their own. Though it necessarily loses some of the depth of Byatt's original, Possession is a worthy adaptation, faithful to the book in both story and spirit. Director Neil LaBute uses clever and visually elegant methods of switching back and forth between time periods, subtly contrasting the prickly moderns and the swoony Victorians without making either pair seem unappealing. The movie also does an excellent job of capturing the exhilaration (and the politics) of intellectual discovery, and feels truly romantic without ever getting icky. Though Paltrow and Eckhart both succeed as the modern leads, the real standouts are Jeremy Northam as Randolph Henry Ash and Jennifer Ehle as Christabel LaMotte. Their passion gives the movie its romantic core and makes the whole search worthwhile. --Ali Davis

Customer Reviews for Possession

Captivating Movie
I stumbled upon this movie while I was looking up Jennifer Ehle acting career. I do love her in Pride and Prejudice. This movie was well written and directed. Jennifer Ehle and Jeremy Northam (another fav of mine) were wonderful in this film and the chemistry was beautiful. I actually watched my rental twice!! I do believe I'm going to purchase this video for my private collection.Possession

POSSESSION
POSSESSION (1999), set in England and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, and Jennifer Ehle, is an interwoven tale connecting the past with the present. Director Neil LaBute does a terrific job of mixing a period piece with contemporary times, weaving it into a seamless work of art. Based on the novel by A.S. Byatt, the film delineates the tale of two academic poets in contemporary London who set out to discover secrets of the past that are intricately tied to the present. In their search for the truth, the couple in the present piece together a love story from the past. In doing so, they find that they also serve a vital piece of history in the making.Possession

Undiscovered gem
A Film I first saw in a little independent cinema in the Somerset city of Bath, expecting nothing, but finding my heart bursting from its seams as the film unfolded.

A young American apprentice (Aaron Eckhart) finds himself amongst the snobbery of English literature circles, struggling for a space in the sun of acknowledgement, when he discovers secret love letters written by a Victorian poet (Jeremy Northam). Our American apprentice teams up with an English scholar (Gwyneth Paltrow), and they find themselves falling in love as the Victorian love story of the poet and his secret lover unfolds.

Possession is a tender and beautiful film: both love stories - modern and Victorian - interwoven and wonderfully performed by Eckhart, Paltrow, Northam and Ehle; its cinematography and costume design painting it beautifully, and finished off in Gabriel Yared's moving score.

It is one of my all time favourites.Possession

Possession - the movie
I had rented this movie several times and decided I liked it enough to own it. I really fell in love with the intertwined stories - very moving and continues to hold my interest. The couple in present time are researching the couple from an older time. Each segment seems true to the characters and the characters from the past (the actors are great) are very convincing. I found this lovely. I also decided to buy the book, which is a best seller, because I wanted to embrace it at a higher level.Possession

Brilliant book dumbed down for film
The book, Possession by A.S. Byatt, was one of the best novels I have read in years. Unfortunately, all of the themes that make it a wonderful novel - feminism, the expectations of society, British reserve, a woman's struggle between love and work, and much more - do not translate well to a movie, and of course don't appeal at all to the modern American moviegoer. The story lines were "dumbed down" to fit the just-under-2-hours pace of a movie, ignoring all of the subtleties that made these characters believable in print.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart have no chemistry between them, and that only underscored the fact that their "struggle" to stay away from each other was poorly written in the film. Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle do sizzle, and made up the only watchable parts of this movie.

If you loved the book, keep it in your head and ignore the film version. If you want a light romance, stick with "Sleepless in seattle" and the like.Possession

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