When I learned that Gwyneth Platrow was slated to play Sylvia Plath, the consumately mischaracterized arch poetess of blue-black-haired teens girls -- their boots worn through from gazing -- I prepared myself for the worst. I imagined Margot Tenenbaum transposed with twill skirts and pearls. The Sylvia Plath mythos has unfolded an Eeyore-esque cutout of the young woman confessional poet who kicks a stone across the grain of American literature toward her demise. But reports of her anti-socialism have been greatly exagerrated, as has the emphasis placed on Ted Hughes' affairs as the trigger for her suicide.
Still, loving and loving alone undid Sylvia Plath. Her Unabridged Journals reveal an intensely neurotic whimsy that latches lamprey-style to the ideals of romantic love, motherhood, language and the poetry of each. This film reveals the same intensely neurotic whimsy. While her subdued nasality works against the role, Gwyneth Paltrow becomes the woman whose quietude stems not from melancholy, but from paralytic anxiety -- a mind that won't slow down.
The slope-sliding production design is both beautiful and uncanny, spanning cerulean Massachussets to gray-green Devonshire. The latter creates a hauntingly stark backdrop for the gold-haired writer and her fuzzy penumbra. I don't feel like I'm giving anything away when I say how stunning I find the cranberry-red body bag in which Plath is removed from her dingy brownstone after meticulously taping door cracks to gas herself to death. Biopics aren't about what happens. People who care know how she cut crusts from bread, poured milk, cracked a window, kissed her babies, sat down and died. But people don't know why -- not really anyway. This film is about how Sylvia Plath was silenced when she didn't want to shut up.
Post-partum depression is often not even mentioned when Plath is discussed, so I find the fact that at several points in the film when Paltrow finds herself alone in winter with two crying children, she drops her head into her hands and cries "I'm so exhausted. I'm just so tired." At these moments, jaded as I am, I am moved to tears, and I don't think it's only because I identify completely; Paltrow is just that good. Daniel Craig humanizes the enigmatic Ted Hughes who is alternately villified and knighted by literary critics. They apparently see only those two options as viable handlings. While I think he was more than a bit of a butthole, this picture gets at the guts of the relationship and rightly trivializes liquoring, carousing and outright infidelities as inherently destructive forces, underscoring memory and their isolating effects of "negative" behaviors as the true culprits.
