Jamesian literary mystery in the vein of The Aspern Papers and The Figure in the Carpet. Two present-day scholars, an American male who specializes in a fictitious Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria and an English female who specializes in a lesser-known poetess known to be a lesbian, track down evidence of a secret affair between their two specialties, and strike a similar spark between themselves. You can imagine their excitement as academic detectives, never mind as potential lovers. Yet you cannot really feel it, perceive it, sense it. (Even the rival treasure hunters from New Mexico can't turn up the flame.) Part of this might be traced to the casting of Gwyneth Paltrow, the Anti-Charisma, reprising her clothespin-on-nose British accent, and the unshaven Aaron Eckhart, who seems to say it all about himself when he assures his genteel hostess that he's just "a brush-and-flush kind of guy." Part of it, too, might be traced to the mere fact of adaptation to another medium: puncturing the literary airtightness of the A.S. Byatt novel and flooding it with raw, rough, washed-out illustrations. Whatever the merits of the novel, it plays on screen as little more than a sop story with highbrow pretensions, a paperback romance bound in Moroccan leather. Jennifer Ehle, the Pseudo-Streep, and Jeremy Northam, suave as ever, wear their costumes well in the flashbacks to the 19th Century, and in general carry off their roles better than their modern counterparts. ("You cut me, madam." "I only meant to scratch.") But the spectacle — the stunt — of the astringent, the acid Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) turning his attention to High-Tea Cinema is not so much broadening of his image as shattering of it. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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