Sylvia

RogerEbert

'Fame will come. Fame especially for you. Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes You will have paid for it with your happiness, Your husband and your life.' So (perhaps) the spirit of the Ouija board whispered to Sylvia Plath one evening when she and Ted Hughes were spelling out their futures and she suddenly refused to continue. Hughes uses the speculation to close his poem "Ouija" in Birthday Letters, the book of poetry he wrote about his relationship with Plath. It was started after her suicide in 1963 and published after his death in 1998. It broke his silence about Sylvia, which persisted during years when the Plath industry all but condemned him of murder.

But if there was ever a woman who seemed headed for suicide with or without this husband or any other, that woman must have been Plath, and there is a scene in "Sylvia" where her mother warns Hughes of that, not quite in so many words. "The woman is perfected," Plath wrote in a poem named "Edge." "Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment..." Of course it is foolhardy to snatch words from a poem and apply them to a life as if they make a neat fit, but "Edge" was her last poem, written on Feb. 5, 1963, and six days later she left out bread and milk for her children, sealed their room to protect them and put her head in the gas oven.

Christine Jeffs' "Sylvia" is the story of the short life of Plath (1932-1963), an American who came as a student to Cambridge, met the young poet Ted Hughes at a party, was kissed by him before the evening had ended, and famously bit his cheek, drawing blood. It was not merely love at first sight, but passion, and the passion continued as they moved back to Massachusetts, where she was from, and where he taught. Then back to England, and to a lonely cottage in the country, and to the birth of their children, and to her (correct) suspicion that he was having an affair, and to their separation, and to Feb. 11, 1963. He was famous before she was, but the posthumous publication of Ariel, her final book of poems, brought greater fame to her. In the simplistic accounting which governs such matters, her death was blamed on his adultery, and in the 35 years left to him, he lived with that blame.

Hughes became Britain's poet laureate. He married the woman he was having the affair with (she died a suicide, too). He burned one of Plath's journals -- he didn't want the children to see it, he said -- and was blamed for covering up an indictment of himself. He edited her poetry. He saw her novel The Bell Jar to press, and kept his silence.

Birthday Letters is all he had to write about her. When you read the book you can feel his love, frustration, guilt, anger, sense of futility. When you read her poetry, you experience the clear, immediate voice of a great poet more fascinated by death than life. "Somebody's done for," she wrote in the last line of "Death & Co." (Nov. 14, 1962), and although that line follows bitter lines that are presumably about Hughes, there is no sense that he's done for. It's her.

A movie about their lives was probably inevitable. It will be bracketed with "Iris," the 2001 film about the British novelist Iris Murdoch, who died of Alzheimer's. I deplored the way that movie made so much of Iris the wild young thing and Iris the tragic Alzheimer's victim, and left out the middle Iris who was a great novelist -- whose work made her life worth filming in the first place. I am not so bothered by the way "Sylvia" focuses on the poet's neurosis, because her life and her work were so entwined.

Dying/Is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well. ... she wrote.

The film stars Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia and Daniel Craig as Ted. They are well cast, not merely because they look something like the originals but because they sound like workers who live with words and value them; there's a scene where they hurl quotations at each other, and it sounds like they know what they're doing. Paltrow's great feat is to underplay her character's death wish. There was madness in Sylvia Plath, but of a sad, interior sort, and one of the film's accomplishments is to show in a subtle way how it was so difficult for Hughes to live with her. The movie doesn't pump up the volume. Yes, she does extreme things, like burning his papers and wrecking his office, but he does extreme things, too. Adultery is an extreme thing. In this consider the scene where Hughes meets Mrs. Plath for the first time. Played by Blythe Danner(Paltrow's mother), Aurelia tells her daughter's lover that Sylvia had tried to kill herself and was a person who was capable of getting it right one of these times.

It is difficult to portray a writer's life. "Sylvia" handles that by incorporating a good deal of actual poetry into the movie, read by or to the characters, or in voice-over. It also captures the time of their lives; they were young in the 1950s, and that was another world. England gloomed through postwar poverty, there were shortages of everything, red wine and candles made you a bohemian, poets were still considered extremely important, and Freud was being ported wholesale into literature; poets took their neuroses as their subjects. Literary criticism was taken seriously, because it was written in English that could be understood and had not yet imploded into academic puzzle-making. To be good in that time was to be very good, and Plath and Hughes both were first-rate.

There are two questions the movie dodges. We don't know the precise nature of Hughes' cheating, and we don't understand how Plath felt about the children she was leaving behind -- why she thought it was acceptable to leave them. The second question has no answer. The answer to the first is supplied by Hughes' critics, who accuse him of womanizing, but the film dilutes that with the suggestion that he simply could not stay in the same house any longer with Sylvia.

Imagine a hypothetical moviegoer who has not heard of Plath or Hughes or read any of their poetry. That would include almost everyone at the multiplex. Is there anything in "Sylvia" for them? Yes, in a way: A glimpse of literary lives at a time when they were more central than they are now, a touching performance by Paltrow, and a portrait of a depressive.

But for those who have read the poets and are curious about their lives, "Sylvia" provides illustrations for the biographies we carry in our minds. We see the milieu, the striving, the poverty, the passion, and we hear the poetry, and in the way Paltrow's performance allows Sylvia to grow subtly distant from her daily life, we sense the approach of the end. There is not even the feeling that we are intruding, because the poems of these two poets violated their privacy in a manner both thorough and brutal.

NYTimes

''Dying is an art.'' These words, from Sylvia Plath's poem ''Lady Lazarus,'' are the first spoken in ''Sylvia,'' Christine Jeffs's emotionally rich life of the poet, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow. The assertion may be debatable, but there is no question that Plath's own death -- she committed suicide in 1963, at 30 -- has been subject to unending analysis and interpretation, framed by the kind of inquiry that usually guides classroom literary analysis. (The literary critic A. Alvarez, who was Plath's close friend and who is portrayed in the movie by Jared Harris, likened her death to a final unwritten poem.) What was Plath's intention? What did her suicide mean? What did it reveal about her family, her society, her time, her sex, herself?

The answers to these questions, chewed over by biographers, novelists, polemicists and fellow poets, have been contentious, and nothing in Plath's biography has proved more polarizing than her marriage to Ted Hughes, who survived her and became Britain's poet laureate in 1984. (He died of cancer in 1998.) Hughes's role in Plath's adult life (they married in 1956), his behavior in the period just before her death and his subsequent actions as the executor of her literary estate have been at the heart of an interminable argument about Plath's legacy, and have at times overshadowed her own poetry as well as his. Many of Plath's admirers treat her as a martyr and Hughes as, symbolically if not actually, her murderer. Her short life has become, fairly or not, a parable of the stifling of women's self-expression by a chauvinist literary establishment in the years before feminism. Those more sympathetic to Hughes have preferred to see him as a fellow sufferer, a flawed, talented man married to a gifted woman with a history of mental disturbance, who had first tried to kill herself long before she met him.

Although partisans on both sides may disagree, ''Sylvia,'' which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, tries to address the Plath-Hughes marriage even-handedly and resists the urge to turn its heroine's life into allegory. It is more like opera, which is braver, and also more fitting. Ms. Paltrow looks a lot like Plath and speaks with the right semi-Anglicized American preppy accent, but her performance goes well beyond mimicry. She has a vivid, passionate presence, even when her lively features have gone slack with depression and her bright blue eyes have glazed over.

Daniel Craig is a bit more opaque. In Hughes's poems, which are full of violent animal imagery, hawks and crows have a special totemic significance, and Mr. Craig, with his craggy, shadowed face, looks like a rangy, wounded bird of prey. His voice is a low growl, and his sexual magnetism, the trait that is the movie's main concern, is palpable.

The two young poets meet at a party at Cambridge University. At the end of their first kiss, he steals one of her earrings and she bites his cheek, drawing blood. Later, at a small gathering in period-shabby student rooms, they hurl passages of Shakespeare at each other, then tumble into bed. Sex and poetry are linked in this film as if by a high-tension, high-voltage wire, and while the connection may seem facile, it is also, with respect to these writers and their milieu, entirely plausible.

When Ted insists to Sylvia that the true subject of her poetry should be herself, it is worth recalling that, to them, this was not yet a therapeutic cliché but a radical and dangerous creative enterprise. And their fervid, all-consuming desire to be poets is a heady mixture of careerism and more exalted ambitions.

But how to dramatize the creative process and its psychic costs? This is the principal challenge facing any movie about a writer, and it dooms many honorable efforts to either timidity or ridiculousness. (Think of Nicole Kidman, in her Virginia Woolf mask, muttering to those poor daffodils in ''The Hours.'') It helps, in this case, that Ms. Jeffs has a lyrical sensibility that matches her subject. Her jagged, dreamy first feature, ''Rain,'' about a teenage girl's loss of innocence, is at once wide-eyed and pitilessly precise in its psychological insights, qualities it shares with some of Plath's later verses. Ms. Jeffs's understanding of Plath, like Ms. Paltrow's, is deep and sincere, and ultimately more intuitive than analytical. ''Sylvia,'' rather than trying to explain Plath, wants to burrow into her personality without disturbing its mysteries.

The dramatic crux of the movie is the triangle that develops between Plath, Hughes and Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), who became Hughes's second wife, and whose subsequent suicide was a grisly echo of Plath's. The supporting performances, notably Mr. Harris and Blythe Danner, as Plath's stern and sympathetic mother, Aurelia, are excellent. But the emotional core of ''Sylvia'' lies in the feverish transactions between Ms. Jeffs, Ms. Paltrow and the hovering shade of the poet herself. The psychological dynamics of the marriage, unsettled by professional envy and sexual jealousy, are duly noted, but the film's emotions are too big, too untidy and too strange to be contained by its story.

John Toon's cinematography has the thick, oversaturated look of old Technicolor, and the honeyed light that usually surrounds Ms. Paltrow darkens as Plath's miseries increase. The film itself, somewhat like Todd Haynes's ''Far From Heaven,'' which was set around the same time, is oversaturated with feeling, and also with music, as Gabriel Yared's feverish score sends a ripple of melodrama through otherwise ordinary scenes.

This may trouble those who insist on austere literalism in their biopics, but it seems to me that a movie about poets -- especially about these poets, who use blank verse as an aphrodisiac and who gather around the phonograph to listen to a recording of Robert Lowell reading ''The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket'' -- is entitled to some passionate recklessness of its own.

And the poetry that Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Jeffs enact together compensates somewhat for the film's skimpy use of Plath's own words. Toward the end, as she composes the poems that would, when published as ''Ariel,'' secure her posthumous reputation, the words rush onto the soundtrack in a jumble of discontinuous lines, and we hear almost nothing of her earlier work (and nothing at all of Hughes's, though Mr. Craig does a fine recitation of Yeats's ''Sorrows of Love'').

It is Plath's writing that represents, after all the polemicizing is done, her surest claim on our attention. The makers of ''Sylvia'' may, to some degree, have neglected this brilliant, unsettling and tragically foreshortened body of work, but they have not betrayed it. 

''Sylvia'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for nudity, sex and profanity.

SYLVIA

Directed by Christine Jeffs; written by John Brownlow; director of photography, John Toon; edited by Tariq Anwar; music by Gabriel Yared; production designer, Maria Djurkovic; produced by Alison Owen; released by Focus Features. Running time: 110 minutes. This film is rated R. 

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