Possesion recession: the lesbian subplot in this lush literary romance feels all too familiar, even if it's new territory for director Neil LaBute.

Possession * Written by Neil LaBute, David Henry Hwang, and Laura Jones * Directed by Neil LaBute * Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, and Jennifer Ehle * USA Films

If you saw Possession minus its credit sequence, the last person you might guess as its director would be Neil LaBute. With its verdant English countryside vistas and candlelit Victorian passions, it seems worlds away from the cold "men are from malls, women are Venus flytraps" combativeness of Your Friends & Neighbors and In the Company of Men. As matches made in celluloid heaven, this one would seem to be right up there with John Huston and Annie.

Possession is better than Annie, a concession that will probably not send the flacks at USA Films leaping for their quote ads. On closer inspection, there are significant points of alignment between the caustic eloquence of LaBute and the prickly literary societies of A.S. Byatt, whose 555-page novel inspired this problematically telescoped film version.

LaBute probably empathizes with Byatt's 19th-century poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), a tortured fool for love who is able to soft-soap intelligent women despite the "soft-core misogyny" of his poetry. And if Randolph were somehow spirited into the 21st century like Hugh Jackman in Kate & Leopold, he could find a sympathetic ear in Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), a scholar of Victorian poetry who is engaged in a do-or-die mission to unearth Randolph's past.

Recalling the contrasting universes of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Byatt's time-tripping story stalks the gradually intersecting trajectories and parallel romances of the researcher and his subject. Roland (changed to an American from the novel's working-class Brit) enlists the aid of starchy English academic Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow, her hair locked in a chastity-belt bun) when he uncovers a love letter from Randolph to Bailey's great-great-aunt, the feminist poet Christabel LaMotte (the terminally beatific Jennifer Ehle).

The discovery of the illicit romance overturns the conventional scholarship on the two poets: Roland was supposedly devoted to his frigid wife and Christabel was renowned for her loving domestic nest with a painter named Blanche Glover (the wonderful Lena Headey, whose firecracker sensuality is wasted here). Seven decades after Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour validated and annihilated lesbian desire in the same breath, Possession returns gay women to the back of the bus, relegating Blanche to the thankless role of the long-suffering, suicidal doormat.

Never having finished the book, I don't know whether to protest Byatt's Booker Prize or question the gender-busting credentials of LaBute and cowriters David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) and Laura Jones (The Portrait of a Lady). But Possession is just another vicarious thrill for gay audiences. While Blanche is busy sewing rocks into her skirt for a Virginia Woolf swim, Randolph and Christabel are making whoopee in fairy-tale fishing villages. Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, the self-abnegating Maud and Roland are engaged in a tentative mating dance. Down comes Paltrow's hair, off comes Eckhart's shirt.

The stars have genuine heat together. Paltrow's glacial, gorgeous Maud is a convincing yin to the testosterone-dripping yang of Eckhart's Roland, whose halting sincerity and lackadaisical "brush and flush" philosophy of grooming perfectly embodies a certain species of caveman intellectual. They share some citrusy exchanges that would be perfectly at home in the company of Labute's other men and women.

Possession is finally too truncated for material that wants to be a sinuous six-hour miniseries. The attempt at streamlining renders it curiously plodding and occasionally silly: Nancy Drew Gets Her Ph.D. Why am I not surprised that Nancy would grow up to have serious relationship issues?

Stuart is film critic and senior news writer at Newsday.