Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Possession(12A)<br></br> K-19: The Widowmaker (12A)<br></br> High Crimes (12A)<br></br> Simone (PG)

Anthony Quinn
Friday 25 October 2002 00:00 BST
Comments

Based on A S Byatt's tremendous Booker Prize winner of 1990, Possession keeps promising to take hold but lets the book's dramatic intrigue slip through its fingers. A literary detective story begins when a pair of academics, Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) and Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) discover a cache of letters in which can be traced a secret love affair between two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). Following clues inscribed within the poems and letters, Maud and Roland pursue a trail through England and then to France while echoes and resonances begin to link the two couples across the centuries.

Neil LaBute, a director better known for his misanthropic take on modern sexual mores (notably In The Company of Men), actually handles the Victorian strand of the tale very confidently, aided by Jean-Yves Escoffier's atmospheric photography and some superb acting, not just from Northam and Ehle but also Lena Headey as Christabel's unstable companion, Blanche. The film's problems reside in its determination to make modern academia sexy – no easy task – which prompts LaBute into his chief miscalculation of changing Roland from a shy, struggling Brit to a cocksure, crewneck-sweatered Yank; the dramatic tension between Roland and Maud in the novel, each more uptight than their Victorian antecedents, is completely scuppered by the casting of Eckhart, who looks like he wouldn't know a sexual inhibition if it bit him on the backside. There is nothing plausible to keep the two moderns apart. As Roland says, "On the other side of attraction lies repulsion – Freud. Or is it Calvin Klein?" It's a nice line, but it hints at the film-makers' priorities: thin on psychology, heavy on the American marketing.

Hard to believe that the grim, clangorous submarine movie K-19: The Widowmaker is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who used to make slick, fleet-footed action thrillers like Point Break. This tells the true story, hushed up until the fall of Communism, of a Soviet nuclear submarine whose catastrophic maiden voyage in 1961 almost sparked off the Third World War. Launched on the orders of the Politburo despite its faulty equipment and ill-prepared crew, the sub is skippered by Captain Vostrikov (Harrison Ford), an old-school martinet who quickly crosses swords with his deputy, Captain Polenin (Liam Neeson), and then has to make some tough decisions about an onboard reactor that springs a leak. The scenes in which crew members wade into the radioactive enclosure to try to repair the damage, then emerge scalded and vomiting, are a horrifying testament to individual courage. Unfortunately, the rest of the picture moves with lead boots, intermittently raising the frisson of confrontation only to smother it. Ford is at his most humourlessly intense, while one can scarcely watch the gigantic Neeson without worrying he'll crack his skull on an overhead pipe. Bravo to an American movie that salutes non-American heroism, but as it grinds past the two-hour mark you nevertheless get that sinking feeling.

There's something about the cutely coiffed attorney Ashley Judd plays in High Crimes that set my teeth on edge; she's as hard as nails yet forever blinking back tears – school of Edwina Currie. Ashley belatedly discovers that her husband (Jim Caviezel), a former soldier, may be guilty of murdering defenceless villagers in El Salvador 12 years ago. With the help of the louche attorney Morgan Freeman (complete with motorbike and earring) she sets about proving his innocence in the face of military intimidation and the howling clichés of the script: "It's a cover-up and it's bigger than we thought." For heaven's sake. The contrivances of the plot are ridiculous, none more so than a twist ending so nonsensical that I would have laughed had I not been choking back bile at the time.

Andrew Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show, inverts that film's premise in his latest, Simone. Whereas Jim Carrey was the world's dupe, a film director Victor Taransky (Al Pacino) dupes the world by promoting an actress, Simone, made entirely from computer software – and in a stroke turns around his flagging career. Niccol is sending up our obsession with celebrity and the cycle of publicity that keeps it going, but his script never goes beyond a perfunctory and lumpen whimsicality; the dark thread of unease that ran through The Truman Show is here replaced by a gaudy ribbon of excess. Besides, would a town as cynical as Hollywood really be taken in by such an obvious fraud, particularly a fraud who never, ever gives interviews?

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in