Christine Jeffs (2003)

The film begins with a side-view shot of Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow)’s face.   Her right eye is closed.  Is she dead, is she sleeping?  On the soundtrack Paltrow’s voice reads the following:

‘Sometimes I dream of a tree, and the tree is my life.  One branch is the man I shall marry and the leaves my children.  Another branch is my future as a writer and each leaf is a poem.  Another branch is a glittering academic career.  But as I sit there, trying to choose, the leaves begin to turn brown and blow away until the tree is absolutely bare.’

The eye opens.  Cut to a tree, moving in the wind against an ominous bluish sky; then to a close-up of the tree’s brown leaves.  This opening sequence of images (poetic or what?) gives a good idea of what’s to come in Sylvia.  You can rest assured the tree will reappear at the very end, and so it does.  This time, there’s no foliage close-up but the sky is more cheerfully blue:  legends on the screen confirm Plath’s posthumous reputation, the cachet of her Ariel poems in particular.  Returning to the film for the first time since seeing it on its original release, I found it no easier to understand what sort of audience Christine Jeffs had in mind.  The uninitiated are liable to be left wondering what on earth is the matter with the protagonist.  For those familiar with Plath’s poems, diaries, letters and biographies, Sylvia is disappointingly sketchy.

What was the matter with Sylvia Plath?  It’s generally accepted that her father Otto’s death, when she was eight years old, was pivotal in her psychological development.  Jeffs and the scenarist John Brownlow duly note this – Sylvia mentions to Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) that she was emotionally ‘in one piece’ until her father died; near the end of her life, she tells Trevor Thomas (Michael Gambon), the kindly tenant of the flat downstairs from hers, that he reminds her of her father – but that’s as far as the filmmakers go.   Sylvia doesn’t begin to capture the persisting presence of Otto Plath in his daughter’s poetry; or suggest any kind of connection in her mind and imagination between him and Ted Hughes (‘The vampire who said he was you’).  There’s nothing, for example, to link Sylvia’s obsessive fear of betrayal by her husband with her sense of abandonment by a father who proved, shockingly, to be mortal.

The first time she and Hughes go to bed together, he asks about a scar on her face.  She explains it’s a legacy of her suicide attempt three years earlier, which she describes.  Hughes doesn’t ask any more questions and the viewer has no idea what impelled Sylvia’s pills over-overdose (‘I took too many of the damn things and I puked them up’).   In contrast, there’s no shortage of evidence in the film for what led her to take her own life in February 1963, the build-up to which is protracted.  Ted leaves her for Assia Wevill (Amira Casar).  First in her Devon farmhouse, then her Primrose Hill apartment, the deserted Sylvia cares for the couple’s two infant children, generates poems as never before, and falls apart.  This is the popular understanding of Plath’s last days and, in simple terms, is factually correct; but turning her life into biopic without adequately exploring her extraordinary individuality and singular romantic and creative relationship with Hughes, reduces the story to doomed-marriage melodrama.  To make matters worse, Christine Jeffs, determined to give the celebrated antagonists their cultural due, tends to aestheticise the melodrama, draining it of energy.

Had she lived in more recent times, Plath might have been diagnosed as bipolar; her extant journals and her correspondence leave no doubt she was subject to very drastic mood swings, to put it mildly.  Sylvia, whose narrative begins with her and Hughes’s first meeting in Cambridge and ends with her death seven years later, unsurprisingly majors on her depressive side at the expense of her complexity.  In the rare sequences where Sylvia is cheerful, there’s no pressure in the words or smiles of Gwyneth Paltrow, whose fluent but narrow interpretation feels lightweight.  If you listen to the recording of Plath’s BBC radio interview in October 1962, it’s hard not to be struck by her vocal intensity, the combination of forceful articulacy and anxious undertow.  Even if some of that reflects Plath’s nervousness at going on air (though she’d done it before), the difference between this voice and Paltrow’s is chasmal.  It doesn’t help either that the actress is effortlessly beautiful.  Reading Plath’s letters and diaries, you repeatedly get the sense of someone who gave her clothes choices plenty of thought, someone compelled to dress to impress.  Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t look as if she does that, or needs to.

The film conveys next to nothing of Plath’s development as a writer.  It shows her struggling to put pen to paper when she and Hughes, early in their marriage, are living in Massachusetts, but only via the usual cliché, crossing out a few lines of manuscript and scrunching the paper into a ball.  Sylvia Plath, nothing if not self-conscious of her mission to be a great writer, might well have behaved as she’d seen artistic geniuses behave in the movies, but you don’t get a sense of this from the sequence in question.  You just feel Christine Jeffs can’t find a better way of describing creative struggle.  The narrative’s accentuate-the-negative tendencies mean that, even when Plath’s first collection, The Colossus, is published (in late 1960), she’s not allowed to enjoy the achievement.  At the press launch, she asks a journalist (Jeremy Fowlds), who doesn’t even know who she is, if he’ll be reviewing The Colossus:

Journalist:  This? I shouldn’t think so.  We just got the new Pasternak.  Then Betjeman’s out next week, and there’s an e.e. cummings in the pipeline. Not in the same league, really, is she, this Sylvia …

Sylvia:  Plath.  [The journalist is distracted by the sound of laughter.  He looks round to see Ted Hughes surrounded by female admirers.]

Journalist:  Poor thing. Can’t be easy for her, being married to that.  Still, good party.  Thank the boss.

This pushback would have more impact if Paltrow’s Sylvia were more aggressively forward than she is.  Still, the exchange can’t be accused of failing to make its gendered point clearly (not to say laboriously).   On the whole, though, Sylvia pays so little attention to Plath’s writing that you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s as well Hughes walked out on her.  Early in the film, he returns to their Massachusetts beach house, after a spot of fishing, to discover his wife has baked a cake instead of writing a poem.  He tells her off.  The Colossus is, for Sylvia, no more than the means to an end of social humiliation.  The strong, insulting implication is that she’d never have got anywhere without her husband’s adultery to spark her phenomenal last-ditch productivity.  And while Jared Harris makes a decent fist of playing Al Alvarez, it’s unfair on that eminent man of letters that his words fail him so badly when Alvarez gives Sylvia his reaction to her latest work:  ‘That “Daddy” poem, the use of metaphor, the way it builds at the end … it’s just stunning’.

None of this is helped by the poetry’s being conspicuous by its absence from Sylvia.  If you look up John Brownlow’s screenplay online[1] you find that it begins with famous lines from ‘Lady Lazarus’:

‘Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.’

The fact that this is replaced in the finished product with the ‘tree is my life’ musings makes you wonder if the filmmakers ran into difficulties with the Plath literary estate.  In the first hour of Sylvia, there’s a single quote from a Plath poem:  phoning through corrections to a proof copy of The Colossus, Sylvia utters five words (‘Next the new moon’s curve’) from ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’.  Even in the closing stages, when she’s producing Ariel poems hand over fist, there’s only a montage of phrases from a selection of them.  None of the poems is heard in anything like its entirety.  For those of us who know them well, occasional images in the film evoke specific poems:  when Sylvia and Ted swim in a luminous aqua sea at Cape Cod (‘bean green over blue/In the waters off beautiful Nauset’); even in the pretentious overhead shot of her red-blanketed corpse being stretchered away (‘… the woman in the ambulance / Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly’).  But these resonances are a testament to the potency of Plath’s imagery rather than the film’s.  They may not even be intentional.

Whether or not they are, Jeffs is unsuccessful when she aims for more extensive visualisation of a Plath poem, as when she cross-cuts between Sylvia’s destruction of letters that she finds in Ted’s possession, and his having sex with Assia.  The inspiration is clearly ‘Burning the Letters’ but the bonfire is OTT and the intercourse has the quality of garish nightmare.  The sequence might work if we could accept both its aspects as Sylvia’s febrile imaginings but neither fits with Gwyneth Paltrow’s lovely melancholy.   The sex in the film is bad throughout.  A few days before her suicide, Sylvia, after weeks of looking wan and unkempt, does her hair and make-up and puts on a slinky, shiny dress.  When Ted calls at the flat, it has the desired effect and they sleep together once last time.  He says nothing as she assures him they can put all the bad times behind them; when she tells him ‘You’ll never have with her what you have with me’, he briefly concurs before explaining that he can’t leave Assia, who’s now pregnant.  (Jeffs then instantly cuts to Sylvia’s last call on Trevor Thomas, the night before her death.)  Her seduction number and the post-coital conversation are aberrant enough to be fantasies but they seem meant to be for real (and Ted’s terse revelation of Assia’s pregnancy confirms that).  As such, they’re hollowly improbable.

The film doesn’t demonise Hughes but some of this is down to Daniel Craig’s physical miscasting.  Like Paltrow, Craig acts intelligently but his Ted is a callow, shifty presence – and too short, about the same height as Paltrow and getting on for five inches shorter than the real Hughes.  (That also makes Craig slightly less tall than Plath actually was.)  His dark wig seems to reduce him further:  he’s nothing like a sufficiently powerful presence.  While they’re both teaching at Smith College, her alma mater[2], Sylvia is suspicious that Ted is flirting, or worse, with one of his many female admirers.  After leaving a faculty party early, she answers a ring on their doorbell to find a girl student brandishing poems she’s written, and which she says ‘Mr Hughes’ has offered to read.  Ted returns home later, takes one look at Sylvia’s face, and apologises.  ‘What for?’ she asks.  ‘I don’t know yet,’ he replies.  This is a pithy exchange but it also reflects what’s unconvincing about the dynamic between the two principals.  Ted sometimes comes across as a merely henpecked husband.

Christine Jeffs confirmed in Sunshine Cleaning (2008), her next picture after this one (and still her most recent cinema feature), that she knows how to direct actors but the crucial characterisations in Sylvia are misconceived.   It must have seemed a good idea to cast Blythe Danner, a fine actress and Gwyneth Paltrow’s mother, as Aurelia Plath.  Danner, as well as matching up physically with her daughter, plays Aurelia with impressive emotional precision but her high-born manner is socially all wrong.  Sylvia’s relationship with her mother was fraught and complicated:  many of her more upbeat letters home are pieces of practised dissimulation designed to assure the persistently concerned Aurelia that all is well.  One thing that emerges from the letters as no pretence is the evidence of Aurelia’s overwork and frugality (and the effect on Sylvia of her mother’s self-denying scrimping and saving).  In the film, the welcome party for the newlyweds at the Plath home in Boston is too opulent.  We do see Aurelia and Sylvia baking in the kitchen beforehand but the gathering itself is designed mainly to show Ted, radiating his rural Yorkshire origins, as socially ill at ease – and, to Aurelia’s circle of friends, an amusing curiosity.  Blythe Danner’s portrait aligns with this misunderstanding of milieu.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Jeffs and her cinematographer John Toon (who is also her husband) create arresting one-off images in preference to realistic visual context.   The leaves on that wretched tree at the start blow into Cambridge-in-autumn for Sylvia’s first encounter with Ted, even though that actually took place in February.  There’s a surprising lack of spatial contrast between the couple’s home in the Devon countryside and the North London places.  Plath died during the ‘big freeze’ British winter of 1962-63:  Jeffs gives us plenty of snowfall but little sense of cold.  When Trevor Thomas opens the door of his flat to Sylvia, he stands and talks in his pyjamas, no dressing gown.  Sylvia doesn’t shiver in the sleeveless dress she wears to lure Ted into bed, even when she goes outside in it.  After the ambulance has arrived to take her corpse away, the window she left ajar to ensure that fumes from the gas oven didn’t affect her two young children in the next room, stays open.

These visual ‘moments’ reflect Sylvia more largely.  There are vivid bits:  Sylvia and Ted playing a game with fellow students in Cambridge to see who can recite a chunk of Shakespeare fastest; the ill-fated visit of Assia and her poet husband David Wevill (Andrew Havill) to the Hugheses in Devon, culminating in an explosively splenetic evening meal; Sylvia’s baby relentlessly crying.   But bits are all they are.  Despite the efforts of Gabriel Yared’s luxuriously tragic score, with cellos doing much of the heavy lifting, the narrative has no dramatic spine or momentum.  Ted Hughes died before Sylvia went into production but plenty of people who mattered were still around at the time:  his and Plath’s two children, Frieda and Nicholas; Hughes’s second wife, Carol Orchard; his formidable elder sister, Olwyn.  Perhaps Sylvia‘s producer, Alison Owen (who worked with John Brownlow and another director before the latter left the project and Christine Jeffs came on board) was anxious not to cause offence to the family.   Those closing legends acknowledge Hughes’s Birthday Letters as well as Plath’s Ariel; there are times that you feel Sylvia means to present both main characters as victims – albeit victims of each other.  Whatever the intention, the result is weak and muffled.  Lines from Plath’s ‘Blue Moles’ might serve as the film’s epigraph/epitaph:

‘Difficult to imagine how fury struck –

Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.’

1 June 2020

[1] http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/s/sylvia-script-transcript-plath-paltrow.html

[2] In the academic year that Plath taught at Smith, Hughes actually taught part-time at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst).   The film, for reasonable reasons of economy, gives the impression they were work colleagues.