Hurry up and kill yourself so we can go home

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If you are like most people, you know little about Sylvia Plath other than the basic facts - that she was a mid 20th century poet who committed suicide. And according to this biopic - based on Plath's life - that suicide didn't occur a minute too soon. Plath, played by Gwenyth Paltrow, is depicted as a friendless (OK, she did have one friend in her students days - after that, all of her social connections were her husband's friends), self-absorbed, loudmouthed, unbearable woman.

The Plath in this film spends little time writing. Instead, most of her energy is spent staring into space, rocking back and forth (perhaps the filmmakers confused being ARTistic with being AUTistic), pouting, baking cakes that she never ate (she never gains an ounce, and even after two children, retains her perky, slender figure), slogging through muddy fields (don't they have any grass in England?) and snowy walkways (doesn't anyone know how to use a shovel?), ripping up her husband's poems, breaking dishes and weeping - with one single, quivering teardrop eternally hanging from the end of her patrician nose.

The art direction is so heavy-handed and loaded with symbolism that just looking at the film is enough to cause depression. In nearly every scene, Plath is dressed in heavy plaid wool skirts and bulky sweaters in dreary shades of brown and green (with a wardrobe like that, who wouldn't want to kill themself?). She sports a wide range of messy, unflattering hairdos. Her homes (a variety of them) all feature dim rooms (didn't anyone know how to turn on a lamp?) with lumpy plaster walls smeared with heavy coats of high gloss paint in shades of mustard yellow, grayish green and dull brown. The sky is leaden. Trees are barren. Dying leaves swirl in the wind. Birds caw. Plath tears up manuscripts and burns her husband's books and clothes ... where? In yet another muddy field.

We are given little insight into Plath's mind, career or concerns. She appears obsessively jealous of her husband's professional success and consumed by his casual affairs (some of which appear to have occurred only in Plath's imagination). Moments after meeting Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), her husband-to-be, Plath bites him, leaving him with blood smeared on his cheek. Shortly thereafter, Plath declares that she was happy until her father died when she was a child, and that she had already attempted suicide before she reached puberty. What tortures was she trying to escape?


When the newlywed Hughes' visit America, we are shown a glimpse of her childhood home - which, in contrast to Plath's own residences, looks charming, cozy, bright and cheerful - and her distant, judgmental mother (played by Paltrow's real-life mother, Blythe Danner). We see her at a party to celebrate the publication of her first book, angry and distracted by the attention her husband is receiving from women in the next room. But who was Sylvia Plath? What drove her? And how did she manage to support herself and her children, since she didn't appear to hold a job or do any successful writing?

The real Plath was a prolific poet who adored children and even wrote a delightful book about a little boy and his wonderful suit of clothes. For the film Plath, her children are mere afterthoughts - although they are rarely shown (and the older, for reasons not mentioned, never seemed to grow an inch), they never complain. In fact, they rarely speak at all, not even when they are wandering through the endless muddy fields in their muddy bedroom slippers.

As Plath, Paltrow has only two briefly nurturing, motherly moments - a dreary Christmas celebration, when she and the children decorate a tiny, nearly barren tree with homemade ornaments and she nuzzles one of the kids - and the time she spends preparing a snack, cracking open the kids' bedroom window, and taping their door closed before sticking her head in the oven and cranking up the gas. But long before Sylvia starts smearing that final knife full of butter on bread, you'll find yourself muttering, "Hurry up and kill yourself so we can go home."

score 1/10

[email protected] 11 October 2003

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0881315/