AS Byatt's elegant literary detective novel has been reduced to one of the stupidest, most badly acted and clumsily directed films I have ever seen. And did I mention boring? Aaron Eckhart plays Roland, an impecunious young US scholar in London, with permanent stubble and studenty bag. He stumbles across a draft manuscript letter in the London Library hinting at a sensational hidden affair between the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and the cloistered proto-feminist Christabel LaMotte (both fictional). So he pals up with Christabel's descendant Maud Bailey, herself a post-feminist critic.

She is played by Gwyneth Paltrow, whose accent makes her sound more than ever like the woman who introduced the first BBC broadcast from Alexandra Palace. Their budding relationship and accumulating discoveries, crudely telescoped in this screenplay, unfold in laborious parallel with the flashback 19th-century affair.

As LaMotte, Jennifer Ehle simpers away under her absurd French Lieutenant's Woman's cloak; Jeremy Northam is thoroughly uninspired as Ash. I groaned every time the camera panned seamlessly from the period-costumed Ash and Christabel to Roland and Maud arriving in their modern car, clothes, etc.

It is incredible that Neil LaBute, the director of superb present-day US dramas, should have chosen material for which he has no feeling whatever. The characters might as well be speaking Martian for all he understands about the nuances of modern British academe or Victorian England. It is horribly similar to Chen Kaige's uncomprehending account of contemporary London in his appalling Killing Me Softly. To paraphrase Evelyn Waugh, entrusting LaBute with Byatt's book is like putting a Ming vase in the hands of a chimp. And bafflingly, Gwyneth picks up a tan at one stage, indicating that she took a break in sunnier climes halfway through principal photography. Good for her.