Words cannot capture the sadness I feel that this film has robbed me of two hours of my life.<br /><br />It is almost impossible to say which part of the film is the worst, since screenplay, direction, and performances are all so reprehensibly bad. There are so many laughable plot turns that I'm not sure if this screenplay was even proofread by someone with any distance. The catalyst for the film's intrigue, a couple of stolen letters that one of our protagonists pilfers from a rare books library, is only the first of many weak moments that in the transition from text to screen lose any plausibility. Someone should have bothered to go into a manuscript and rare book archive to see what stealing from one of these institutions would really be like.<br /><br />I'm actually quite a fan of A.S. Byatt, whose novel is the original source material for this drivel. Possession as a novel is fun, but seriously flawed--When transferred to the screen by an underwhelming cast and crew, though, those flaws become insurmountable obstacles. Any subtleties in the novel's juxtaposition of the two relationships disappear, replaced by the lumbering cliches that permeate the dialogue.<br /><br />David Henry Hwang is a fine writer for the stage, but forays into film have more often than not proven that he has not quite mastered the celluloid--it just isn't his medium. Rather than transferring the novel's richness to the screen, he has attached himself religiously to it's rickety frame, certainly not its most successful characteristic. Gwyneth Paltrow's British accent is, as usual, just shy of being believable. Both Paltrow's Maude and Aaron Eckhart's Roland are barely cardboard cutouts rather than characters, and the actors do little to flesh them out. Poor Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle, two fine actors, are squandered in the Victorian scenes where they barely have enough material to establish mood.<br /><br />As for the representation of academic life, it's more than a little absurd, which is actually fine with me since academic life is even more absurd than this film could hope to capture.<br /><br />Overall, I was terribly disappointed, since I was hoping this would be good candy for the academic set.<br /><br />