The first thing I thought as I walked out of the theater after seeing this movie was, how nice, a movie for grown-ups. It's very nice for a change to see a movie that features no explosions, no guns, not a single car chase. In their place we are left with two love stories. One in the present and one in the past.
The movie begins with Aaron Eckhart as a young American professor working in England on a fellowship. He is researching the 19th-century poet Randolph Henry Ash. This movie is based upon a book and it has irked some reviewers who are familiar with the book that this character has been made an American when in the book he is English. I haven't read the book and I can tell you that it didn't bother me at all. Apart from the fact that for an English Professor he is very buff, he plays the part as decently as it is required.
He discovers a letter which leads him to believe that Ash was having an affair with another English poet of the times; the lesbian poet Christabel LaMotte. He follows this lead to the leading authority on LaMotte; Gwyneth Paltrow's character.
Gwyneth, who is practically English anyway, plays her typical English lass here. As usual, her accent is impeccable and she is sexy and repressed all at the same time.
Together these two professors began to investigate the two poets' possible links and the two love stories unfold, one in flashback and one in the present.
The movie is slow-paced and attempts to be poetic and it's easy to see how this story would have been better told on the printed page where more of the poetry could come through, but it still manages to tell a sweet love story without ever becoming cloying or overly done.
As the mystery of the poet's past love is unraveled, the two modern lovers discover that their lives too possess poetry and maybe we the audience do too.
