Clumsy Plath

This film is a disgrace. The plot shuffles. Sylvia Plath meets soon-to-be-famous poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) at a party in Cambridge in 1955. She had been depressed as a young girl, but now she is Gwyneth Paltrow. They marry. He writes. She can't. He is unfaithful. She pleads and grows her hair wild. She writes, then gasses herself.

There is no sense of this relationship being lived or loved in the moment because the whole film has a postsuicide tone: tears ground into the carpet, walls the green of Welsh surf. Craig scribbles at his desk, his mouth flattened into a duck's bill, under a fringe the colour of tar. The only time he comes to life is when the phone rings in an ominous way and he has to get to it before Sylvia, who is mad, jealous and laden with babies and clanking buckets. Poor Craig has to do all his best acting with nothing but the cool, smooth weight of a telephone receiver in his hand. When he is in contact with his screen wife he is nothing at all. This Plath - so battered, so mortified - leaves everybody limp. Thanks to Hughes's many infidelities (and an oversimplification), she suffers ruinously from an overwhelming feeling of things lost and gone for ever.

This Plath has no brains, no talent. There is no thrill coming off her. Nothing of what it is to be a busy, truculent, charismatic - somebody, capable of both fierce love and (as Fay Weldon has recalled) of looking down her Bostonian nose, all the way past her Pisces chin, at her workingclass husband. Is this the truth? Your head hurts with trying to peer at the real story, as though it were contained in a newspaper fluttering on a bench.

Whatever the facts, clearly none of them can be told straight, because this is a couple who lived intensely, on a plane invisible to literalists. Yet they were so busy chugging from Cambridge to Devon to Suicide Hill, that there is no time for anything beautiful: for Hughes's immense charm and wit, for all the tenderness.

The gang of pedants - precisely the "peanut-crunching crowd" that Plath so despised - behind this film seem to fear the creation of a poem as one might an incomprehensible miracle. So they tiptoe, but clumsily, heedless of Plath's own warning in her most frightening poem, Daddy: "There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars."

Sylvia
Cert: 15