Nom de Plume

If you haven’t already seen Sylvia, don’t bother. Half an hour into it, I was fervently praying that she would go ahead and gas herself.

To be fair, I went to the movie fully expecting to hate it. The last movie I saw Gwyneth Paltrow in was Possession, my absolutely favorite A.S. Byatt novel. She was lousy in that too–but at least some of the onus was taken off her by an awful script that took terrible liberties with the story. But I had to go to Sylvia anyway. And then, having paid for the ticket, felt compelled to stay until the bitter end. And bitter it was.

Singlehandedly, Paltrow managed to turn Sylvia Plath into a whining, self-indulgent woman I just wanted to smack. She cries, stares mournfully into space, rocks back and forth at her desk, and doesn’t brush her hair. But at no point does she manage to portray mental illness or depression in a way that gained the audience’s sympathy. I came away thinking, “Wow. And all that for the breakup of a marriage? Get into therapy and get over it!”

One of my main objections to Paltrow is that she always seems to be playing the same character: herself. She also shows stubborn unwillingness to be anything other than pretty on the screen. With any close-up, the glint in her eye seems to say, “And don’t I look nice playing this role?” Indeed the most powerful scenes in the movie were those in which she allowed herself to be ugly. Unfortunately, these were few and far between–and believe me, I was counting the seconds.