"Sylvia"

"Sylvia" seesaws in its point of view, showing one partner's side and then contrasting it with the other's. Plath seethes with jealousy after spotting Hughes with a pretty student, and calls him on what she perceives as his unfaithfulness, to which he replies that if he does start sleeping with students, she'll be the first to know. In a later scene, after endless rounds of similar accusations, he slams her roughly against a wall and slaps her face. Later still, after the Hugheses have left their cramped London flat and moved to a house in Devon, we see her serving dinner to Assia and her husband, who have come to the house for a visit.

The movie doesn't tell us whether Hughes is already sleeping with Assia, but if the affair has already started, it seems nascent. Plath suspects something is up, though, and she says barely a word to the two guests, snapping when the poor husband asks meekly if they might listen to the new Robert Lowell recording after dinner. With untethered hostility, Plath grabs Assia's soup plate before she's finished eating and proceeds to murderously slice her a piece of pie. Hughes takes her aside to speak with her, and she lashes out at him, asserting that she will not be humiliated. "Nobody's humiliating you," he hisses back. "You do such a bloody good job of that yourself."

In other words, Jeffs and screenwriter John Brownlow haven't bought into anything as simple, or as boring, as the myth of St. Sylvia, the poor, put-upon wife victimized by the bearish thug of a husband. As she's written, and as Paltrow plays her, this Plath is both vulnerable and unbearable. But instead of letting her coast by on the genius train, Jeffs and Brownlow call Plath on her bad behavior. It makes her story more affecting, rather than less: At one point, after he's left Sylvia, Hughes confesses to the couple's mutual friend, the critic Al Alvarez (Jared Harris), "I can't go back to her, but I love her so much." His voice is restrained and yet striated with millions of imperceptible cracks; the movie presents his break from her as a kind of self-preservation, but it acknowledges the huge price he paid in doing so.

Paltrow makes for a reasonably convincing Plath: She's such an openhearted actress that you immediately believe in her vulnerability, if not necessarily her brilliance. But there are places where she has to utter lines -- many of them things actually said or written by Plath -- that make her character so tiresome and self-absorbed that you wonder why you should be interested in the first place. In "Sylvia," Plath always chooses what would otherwise be pleasant or at least profoundly intimate moments between herself and Hughes to swing her big sack o' woe down with a thunk. Just after she and Hughes have made love, and lie in bed entwined in each other's shadows, she intones, "I tried to kill myself three years ago." Not much later, when the two find themselves in a rowboat on a patch of rough New England ocean and Hughes expresses fear that he might not be able to get the boat back to shore, she announces darkly, "I tried to drown myself once."

Although they're played to be dead serious (and there's little doubt that in real life, Plath suffered from serious clinical depression, at the very least), these assertions start to seem comical, like a Carol Burnett movie parody in which a character announces her impending death with a meek, feeble cough. "I was dead, but I rose up again like Lazarus," Paltrow's Plath tells Hughes cheerfully and firmly, but we know that the line is really a dry run for one of the poems that would appear in Plath's final book, the 1965 "Ariel," which cemented her literary reputation. "Lady Lazarus, that's me," she says. Even if Plath did say such a thing in real life, in the movie it feels like just another kind of corny foreshadowing.

Ultimately, "Sylvia" is too full of moments like that. Jeffs -- whose previous feature was a nicely observed coming-of-age movie called "Rain" -- takes great care to show us Hughes' and Plath's suffering, together and apart, and to make it clear that Plath couldn't have been easy to live with. And yet the fact that Jeffs is so respectful of the Hughes-Plath union presents its own set of troubles. Just how do you put a marriage on-screen respectfully, but also in a way that illuminates something about the characters involved in it? "Sylvia" was shot with extreme care, perhaps too much care, by John Toon: We're treated to lots of quietly shuffling golden autumn leaves, glinting tragically in the sunlight, another classic portent of early death.

Jeffs is ultimately undone by the "We love each other so much that we can't stand each other" subtext of the Plath-Hughes story; its melodrama is what attracts us as an audience in the first place, but in her painstaking efforts to avoid prurience, Jeffs makes it all a little bit too tasteful. "Sylvia" often feels like a Lifetime made-for-TV movie, a seemingly modern yet weirdly retrograde version of the type of doomed-romance weeper that some imaginary stay-at-home mom might turn on in her last two hours of peace before the kids come clattering home from school.

It's a little surprising that "Sylvia" is so conventional, considering that Plath, whatever you think of her work or her life story, openly defied plenty of the '50s conventions. I don't think Plath should be canonized for that, just as I don't think she should be canonized merely for the fact that she suffered, or was "difficult." But what kind of woman bites a man on the cheek when she first meets him? That's the Sylvia Plath I find most compelling, the one who had an appetite for life, at least in the small windows of time while she wasn't obsessing about death.

Sylvia Plath is a fascinating character but a lousy icon. I don't happen to care much for her poetry: Where others see passion, I see carping; her version of hard-bitten introspection reads like extreme self-pity to me. Would I feel differently if Plath's short and tragic life -- and Hughes' life along with it -- hadn't been hijacked by any number of book-benumbed thinking-cap types who drive agendas as if they were glamorous, racy little red sports cars? Probably. But I can't change the way Plath's legacy has been appropriated any more than I can change the specifics of her life.

At least "Sylvia" has the good grace to reject using the lives of real people, entwined in a real marriage, to tick off easy points about either sexual or literary politics. It puts Hughes and Plath behind the wheel of their own destinies, suggesting that before they became one of the most famous (or most infamous) couples of 20th century literature, before either of them became symbol or signifier, they were flesh and blood. And they knew each other much better than any of us ever can.

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