Plath

I just finished watching the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sylvia which is based on the life of the great American confessional poet Sylvia Plath. Although the movie has been out for sometime, it has always been able to avoid my viewership for some reason or another, so I queued it up on my Blockbuster.com account and received it the other week. I suppose I have heard or seen somewhere that the movie was not considered to be too great, and maybe that is why I have procrastinated in seeing a movie about a poet that has always moved and inspired me.

Now that I have seen the film, I have to agree that it was abysmal. The story line was slow and the plot points fell into so many jumbled pieces that it was often frustrating to watch. I couldn't help but feel that the movie was making an effort to try and mask Ted Hughes's mistreatment of Plath with excuses of her sanity, or lack thereof. In one scene, they even have Sylvia Plath trying to admit that Hughes's affair was an after effect of her not trusting him. It's exacerbating to watch a movie about such a magnanimous person, but yet the screenwriters are boxing her life into a drab existence that I find extremely offensive to her actual genius.

There was another film that came out years ago called The Bell Jar, which was based on her autobiographical novel. The movie's director took some liberties with the script, even including an element of lesbianism that Ted Hughes, at the time, found revolting. He sued the film company and the film makers and won the lawsuit. Ted Hughes, who was the Poet Laureate of England, died of cancer in 1998 shortly after the release of his book Birthday Letters which contained poems about his relationship with Plath and his subsequent mistress. Throughout his life Ted Hughes would never talk about Plath, and it was a shock when the book was released to an eager public that has always wanted to know his thoughts about those tragic events. I think he continuously wrestled with the demons of Plath's suicide and saw how his serial-adultery affected the world's affinity for her work and the world's disgust for him.

Ted Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill, would later commit suicide in a very similar fashion to Sylvia Plath. With her daughter, Shura (fathered by Hughes), in tow, Wevill dragged a mattress into the kitchen, feed Shura and herself sleeping medicine, and then turned on the unlit oven's gas. Plath didn't murder her children, she stuffed towels around their door frame to insure their survival when she took her own life. Wevill, haunted by the presence of Plath's death, tried to end her humiliation of the entire Hughes experience by destroying herself and anything that was a sign of her infidelities with Hughes, namely their daughter.

Ted Hughes seems to have lived a life filled with defense of his short time with Plath. Being the widower, he possessed the power of editorialship and would often filter any information about Plath so she was made to look like an insane buffoon and he the victim. It has always been hard to buy a Sylvia Plath volume and know that the money was going to a man that many blame for her death. Although he had passed away before the release of this film, Sylvia still seems like an effort to redeem Hughes from the shackles he has worn, and still does wear, even in his own death, in regards to the demise of Sylvia Plath.

Cinema is a powerful tool that can touch many people's lives and minds throughout the world. I think that in due time a screenplay will emerge that sheds a deeper understanding of the conflicts Sylvia Plath faced in her life, especially in her frantic final days in 1963. Until then, her works, although few, can keep even the most devoted readers flabbergasted, amazed, and speechless. Now that I think about it, maybe the "cinema of the mind" should be where Sylvia Plath succeeds best, as she dances and twists in the ballroom of ravaged rhythm and macabre metaphor.