Sylvia
Sylvia Plath's later poems were composed in the devastated detail that only hurt and envy over a lover can ignite. In ''Sylvia,'' a new film about the poet's brief adult years, screenwriter John Brownlow and director Christine Jeffs try presenting this angst in cinematic terms. The results are mixed, but noble.
The experience of reading Plath would be hard to duplicate with any real, penetrating success - so fiercely voluble, so interior. The words lead only into darkness. Yet Plath's seven-year marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes had a radioactive glow worthy of a juicy telling. Even when it was good, something was wrong. From this unstable union came a depressed woman's suicide.
The film had originally been called ''Ted and Sylvia,'' an admirable attempt to present a tragedy from two angles. But as in most films about women in thunderous couplings with fellow artists (''Camille Claudel,'' ''Frida''), Brownlow and Jeffs side with the lady. They demonstrate smatterings of sympathy for Hughes's predicament, but it's hard not to identify with Gwyneth Paltrow's shrewd interpretation. She bounds through the proceedings with a startling resemblance to Plath and a meteoric fervor.
Thirty years ago Faye Dunaway would have needed a lion tamer to stop her from ripping up every frame of this picture. Yet even when Plath acts up, Paltrow displays intelligence while still holding on to the hunger that churned in her poems. In her first encounter with Ted, Sylvia is utterly voracious, helping herself to a bite of his cheek.
She was the Smith grad studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship. He was the tall, brooding, hunky gent from Yorkshire. It's not hard to see what draws in 23-year-old Sylvia. At 26, Ted is seductive, with dark, planetary eyes, a bass voice you could play as an instrument, and grave demeanor, all of which made him seem bigger than he really is here.
Hughes is played by Daniel Craig, who does a forceful job with a character the movie discourages you from liking completely.
It's his poem, ''Fallgrief's Girlfriend,'' that really captivates her. It's a ''great, big, crashing'' work, she declares, falling in love at first stanza. Sylvia's crush only intensifies after their marriage. She goes from nervous to livid when female students start showing up at their door and he doesn't come home at a suitable hour. But Ted is warned of Sylvia's fragility, her suicide attempts, and her father's death, in a well-acted encounter with Sylvia's mother, who is played by Paltrow's mother, Blythe Danner.
As a wife, Sylvia seems to underwhelm Ted. While he's out composing or whatever he does when he leaves the house, she's home, idle. You get the sense that he finds his wife's lack of creative inspiration disgusting. Her interest in baking, for one thing, starts to look like a disorder that has nothing to do with her poetry.
That starts to change when he challenges Sylvia to explain what her poems are about, which she does on a cloudless day in a rowboat that Ted fears will be swallowed by the current. She tells him about one of her suicide attempts, and Paltrow effectively shows you Sylvia's brief entrance into her darker spirit. Her face lights up, but the mood is spooky, and Ted sits at the other end of the boat, looking nervous for the first time.
At heart, ''Sylvia'' is constructed as a psychological suspense film framed around the ambiguities of Hughes's infidelity and Plath's resulting paranoia. So at its strangest, the movie is a potboiler. Sylvia explodes. Ted yells back. She calms herself, goes off again in front of dinner guests, he packs a bag and leaves.
Jeffs's last movie, 2001's formulaic coming-of-age drama ''Rain,'' had a younger but equally truculent heroine. ''Sylvia'' is her second movie, and the director has a stronger sense of her subject's deterioration. What's missing is the poetry itself - no offense to John Toon's radiant cinematography and Tariq Anwar's editing, both of which are inspired.
Plath's words come to life only at the end of the film, when Paltrow tears into ''Daddy,'' enraptured by rage like Eddie Vedder in Pearl Jam's salad days. Yet Jeffs, for some reason, shows us the tail end of this spoken-word meltdown but denies us the theater of its construction. It's a long piece, but not that long. The words rush over you like lava, singeing everything. You're left wishing Jeffs had realized that Paltrow is powerful enough to do the same.
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