Sylvia
With Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Amira Casar, Andrew Havill, Lucy Davenport, Blythe Danner, and Michael Gambon.
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
In college it always seemed like the guys who were poets got more girls than the prose writers. The assumption was that poets had all the romance and sensuality associated with their medium working for them. Poetry, after all, isn’t just a block of printed material; it’s an activity, and one that can turn people on sexually as well as spiritually.
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I object more strenuously to McCarthy’s opening gambit–“As grim as much of Sylvia Plath’s life may have been, it wasn’t as relentlessly bleak as the movie ‘Sylvia’”–which I’d probably find presumptuous even if it came from one of her friends. Of course presumed knowledge about her life has been a central aspect of the Plath myth ever since her suicide at 30, which helped to bring that myth into being–especially for those who’ve fetishized her as a prefeminist martyr. I find nothing bleaker about the life of Plath and Hughes than something this movie pointedly, if understandably, omits: Assia Gutmann Wevill (played in the film by Amira Casar)–with whom Hughes lived after he separated from Plath and with whom he had a daughter, Shura–killed herself and Shura six years after Plath’s suicide, when she was 34 and Shura 2. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, just as Plath did. It’s worth adding that Wevill was a poet, and that, according to Paul Alexander’s biography Rough Magic, the “burden of living in the shadow of Plath” played a significant role in motivating her act.
The terrible thing about Plath “dying exceptionally well” is that her suicide appeared to clinch her fame–as if the poetry she wrote wasn’t quite enough. I remember how angry I was when one of my professors argued that her suicide “proved” many of the assertions of her poems, giving them a legitimacy they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Whether one buys this theory or not, it points to the factor that dooms most literary biopics, including serious ones–the all but obligatory tendency to privilege the life over the work. In this case the filmmakers had legal restrictions on how much they could quote from Plath, guaranteeing that the space for her poetry would be small. (As partial compensation, we get a fair sampling of other people’s poetry, including Chaucer’s.)
I can’t imagine what a biopic about Maya Deren (1917-’61)–the person who did the most to create American experimental film as we know it–would be like, and I hope I never have to find out. One of the best things about In the Mirror of Maya Deren–a feature-length documentary in English by Austrian director Martina Kudlacek, playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center a dozen times this week–is that it does such a terrific job of showing us what Deren was like that it makes even the notion of a biopic about her seem unnecessary, if not ridiculous.
