Yesterday, under a glowering grey sky, through whipping winds, the cinetrix piloted her sturdy bike [sans academic robes flapping like a Hughesian crow's wings] to the local Landmark theatre. [disclaimer: The cinetrix appeared prominently as an extra in a Landmark commercial campaign you used to see late at night on pre-Queer Bravo.] Objective: Celebrate daylight savings and the final hours of a grass-widow weekend with a matinee of Sylvia.
In eight years of single-sex education, four spent at a women's college in Sylvia Plath's hometown, I never read any of her poetry or her prose. Perhaps her work seemed a bit obvious to teach to a bunch of privileged bright young things. So I knew about the stove apocryphally, the same way people know about the rats gnawing the undiscovered body of the junk-collecting hermit, and little else.
A question: Was there no paint save grim high-gloss smeared thickly over plaster or vinyl wallpaper in postwar England? And was it all really the colors of a bruise? The set design of Sylvia would have you think so. Paired with the keening, swooping, ululating of the strings on the soundtrack and the feeble desk lamps barely piercing the year-round gloom, it's tough not to think, "No wonder she offed herself. How ugly and overwrought everything is." The only color comes on lipsticked mouths like open wounds. It is all a bit much.
Gwyneth Paltrow delivers a fine, aching performance, husbanding her requisite tasteful nude scene for the crucial "she's come undone" moment, so we understand how naked she is in her madness and pain. Daniel Craig as Ted has the brooding forelock and the gorgeous accent, but when Blythe Danner, as Plath's mother Eulalia, observes that Sylvia must have fallen for him because she is afraid of him, the viewer remains unconvinced of his power to inspire this fear. Not looming enough, perhaps.
Really, though, the performances are uniformly excellent, and Paltrow even turns in an impressive recitation of Chaucer's "Wife of Bath" while standing in a punt. As A. Alvarez, Jared Harris lends his art-house Spader-esque ability to make your skin crawl. I just wish I had written about it yesterday because the film is already slipping away from me, cartwheeling in eddying currents of air like the charred bits of Ted's manuscripts that it seems Sylvia is forever tearing and burning in a helpless rage. [Its rococo influence still lingers....]
Only one scene remains lodged in my memory, but not perhaps for the reasons the filmmakers would hope. A fractious Plath plays graceless hostess to David and Assia Wevill in the Hugheses' remote farmhouse in Devon. Convinced of the affair that her husband and Assia will only later embark on, Sylvia is surly and reckless, hurling plates on the table. It's quite funny, in a way.
After dinner, Ted retreats to the washing up and Assia follows, while David and a fuming Sylvia remain in the other room, listening to a recording of Robert Lowell reading his poem "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." Lowell's thin, homely voice cracks and seems too light and scratchy to be a poet's to ears grown accustomed to the plummy, earnest tones of Paltrow and Craig. When I heard him, I was pulled out of the narrative completely. It made me want to hear the actual Plath and Hughes read their work, to feel a visceral connection to the people who had chosen the words, unmediated by the constraints of Plath's survivors or the ambitions of the cast and the filmmakers.
When the film was over, I emerged from the theatre to find that the rain still threatened. Daring the clouds to break, I climbed back onto my bicycle. Rather than heading home, I must confess that I went off and bought a passel of delicate cardigans in somber shades. That's the danger of these midcentury period pieces starring Paltrow. I come away from them suffused with longing--only it's for tweeds, wellies, and wet woolens.
