It's incomprehensible that a movie about someone so talented, wry, and rageful should be so tedious. The opening shot is of Gwyneth Paltrow (she of the wavering, actorly accent) looking quite dead and reciting several morose lines from the Plath oeuvre ("Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well"). The opening credits follow, set to ominous orchestrations, and in them we are treated to an image of leaves stirring on a branch. No later than the very next scene, Paltrow as Plath experiences a relatively inconsequential career disappointment and the camera swings out onto a grassy expanse over which blows many leaves in slow motion. The music swells. This movie is full of leaves and swelling music.
Certainly, if I were to kill anyone, it would be this composer. The music is moody, maudlin, self-dramatizing, portentous, and heavy, and it's heavy-handedly applied to every minor moment. Plath herself, while she had her moods, was hardly maudlin, and this is plain enough in her work--notably, in her novel The Bell Jar (which Plath admitted was autobiography), which demonstrates an attitude far more sarcastic and self-parodying than the movie (which takes the depressive wounded-woman approach) ever allows. The narrator of The Bell Jar describes herself as "gawky and morbid" and a "prize idiot"; she hates blind dates because she always winds up with "some pale, mushroomy fellow with protruding ears or buck teeth and a bad leg"; and she aspires to marry a garage mechanic and have "a big cowy family." All the serious stuff, too--the suicide attempts, the hospitals--is treated with a certain drollness: "The color scheme of the whole sanatorium," she notes aloofly, "seemed to be based on liver."
But Sylvia, set to all that pensive music, saddened by all those circling leaves, styles itself a very serious movie, and in dramatically arranging the facts of Plath's life it completely misses who she was. It's utterly tone-deaf to its subject, because it disregards Plath's very tone--what Elizabeth Hardwick has called Plath's "interestingly cold, unfriendly humor." There's hardly any humor in Sylvia, cold or otherwise. It's all hurt and hysteria, so you are manipulated to pity her when she dies--probably the last thing this poet would want. As her work makes obvious, Plath didn't despair of dying. She rather liked the idea.
