FilmBlather.com

"Dying is an art, just like everything else. I do it exceptionally well."

Watching Sylvia was a cathartic experience. It is a rare occurence indeed when I come to hate a main character this intensely, and rarer still when it happens in a film that clearly expects me to empathize with her, weep over her, believe that she died for her art. Please. Sylvia Plath, as portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow, is terminally pouty, self-pitying and insufferable; the film around her is miserable and rotten to the core. There are few crueler tortures than spending nearly two hours with this woman and her husband.

Her husband is poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), whose writings about Plath form the inspiration for the film. The two meet in England, where Sylvia is rounding the party circuit trying to get her work reviewed while Ted is basking in the adulation due him for his already renowned poetry. They embark on a tumultuous relationship; Sylvia brings him back to America, where her mother (Blythe Danner) asks how he is going to support her. Unable to remain in the hell that is American suburbia, they move back to England, have two children, and start whining.

Then they whine, and whine, and whine some more. Someone told me that "it's not surprising that someone with a low tolerance for depressives would dislike this movie," but I don't think it's that simple. Sylvia refuses to acknowledge that its title character is sick, and thus there are two possibilities: either this is just an incredibly uninteresting film about clinical depression or we're supposed to believe that Sylvia Plath is trod-upon, that her suffering is genuine, that, as the poster quote says, "life was too small to contain her."

If you choose the former interpretation, then there simply isn't very much left to discuss: as a movie about depression, Sylvia is boring and utterly inadequate. The other possibility is far more appealing as fodder for dissection, and besides, I do think that director Christine Jeffs (Rain) empathizes completely with Sylvia's artistic and emotional plight. The question, then, is why she has created such a loathsome character.

Here is a woman who leaves her very young child playing alone in the driveway while she goes off to build a bonfire and burn her husband's books. Here is a woman who invites two friends over for an overnight stay and proceeds to deliberately and systematically ruin the evening by throwing a disgusting, unwarranted tantrum. Here is a woman who threatens and attempts suicide numerous times -- why? Because she's not satisfied with her work? Because her husband doesn't love her the way she wants him to? I'm sure many will insist that there is a profound meditation on the human condition buried here, but all I see is someone unwilling to stand up and fight her lot in life, a lot that, frankly, isn't even particularly crippling. Life wasn't too small to contain her, she just didn't have the heart to live it.

The fact that this is a portrait of Sylvia from the point of view of Ted Hughes may help to explain why she is such a vile presence, but not why Daniel Craig's Hughes is a similarly one-dimensional and singularly unpleasant person. The amount of times he disgustedly yells "Jesus Christ!" during the course of the movie is unconscionable; he flies off the handle at every opportunity, doing a horrendous job of pretending to be patient while actually nagging and wheedling and having women on the side.

I suppose it's a credit to Craig's performance that all of this comes through so effectively, and if this is the way Sylvia and Ted were in real life then I have no beef with the depiction. But this is hardly a neutral history. What irritated me, constantly and to no end, was that the film wants us to cry for them and their relationship. The final scenes mournfully show Sylvia's corpse wheeled out of the house, and Ted despondent over her death, but watching the rest of the film, I came shamefully close to actually wishing a similar fate on these people.

Gwyneth Paltrow is one of my favorite working actresses, radiantly beautiful, filled with an energy and a life that most others can only counterfeit. Even in Sylvia, she is probably the best choice for a wretched role. This is a woeful two hours of bad poetry, false pathos and intolerable petulance.