Gwyneth Paltrow’s turn as the eponymous heroine in Christine Jeff’s “Sylvia” is one of superbly controlled resignation.  Even at her most spiteful, as in the dinner scene with the Wevills, or when she takes it on the chin, as when Ted (an excellent Daniel Craig) tells her he won’t be coming home, Paltrow’s Sylvia never completely loses it. There is no real “breakdown” in the movie because the breakdown is always taking place. There is simply a battle she fights not to give in to the truth of her life.

The lovely openness of Paltrow’s slender face, her thin eyebrows lancing over those big round eyes, expresses the aching clarity of Sylvia’s sorrow precisely because there’s no way to conceal it. The pain is right there in the delicate smile, not hidden behind it. Her movie star looks are made for happiness, not despair, but this only adds to the deep irony of Sylvia’s fate. When she does lose the battle, the release from pain feels like a victory.

The problem with “Sylvia” is the same problem that sinks nearly every movie about the life of a writer. The soul of the character is in the words, and the words can never be correctly translated into the medium of film. Director Christine Jeffs gives us a well-managed case history, full of facts and faces, but do they add up to an accurate portrait of a writer as complex as Sylvia Plath? No. Do such biographical data add up in any film of this kind? Probably not. As she does in her poems, onscreen Sylvia keeps us at arm’s length even as her life is laid bare.

Her father, so important to the poems in “Ariel”, is given scant onscreen attention, not nearly enough to warrant the outpouring of rage that comes when she belts out “Daddy”. Her rage about Ted’s infidelity shows up loud and clear, but even that comes and goes so quickly the wound he inflicted on her heart seems a shallow one. And almost nothing is revealed about her feelings toward her children, despite the fact that some of her best poems are addressed to Frieda and Nicholas.  The film seems half there, distracted and haunted by what it’s missing—the poems.

The lack of insight into Sylvia’s life is particularly lamentable because it fails to explore the myth surrounding her suicide. Rather than venture a cogent guess as to why Plath really killed herself, Jeffs is satisfied to cultivate a refined but still highly dramatized glow of tragedy and martyrdom around her heroine. The suffering that leads to her suicide appears easy and decidedly unmessy: burn a few manuscripts, smoke a few cigarettes, take some long walks. The act itself is made into a moment of beautiful self-determination. Maybe this is true to Plath; Robert Lowell remarked that Plath had an “air of maddening docility”, and perhaps her suicide was as matter-of-fact as Jeffs makes it out to be.

Surely there was more, though. The film seems gullible, childlike even, in failing to look beyond the more obvious signposts of her depression. For instance, it’s easily to believe that Sylvia was devastated after spending years as second fiddle to Hughes, only to be dumped for another woman, yet there is no explanation of why she carried the hatred of her father with her for so many years (he died when she was eight). And while she keenly felt the restrictions of her roles as wife and mother in the late fifties, she was also an artist who had studied at Cambridge and probably could have avoided the era’s traditional obligations if she’d wanted to. Instead the film lingers on the surface, flirting with idolatry as it depicts the fascinating, and probably false, feeling of control that is supposed to typify the suicides of the “strong willed”.

Sylvia’s final scene appears to be a positive step into the sublime rather than a final descent into the dark abyss, as she herself characterizes death earlier in the film. For Sylvia death really is a homecoming, in spite of what Al Alvarez tells her. Again, maybe this was true for Sylvia. But the film seems timid because it doesn’t test the truth of her will to die. This repeats the error committed by a number of people who fall under Plath’s spell, those for whom the romance of her suicide requires no explanation, only empathy. Leaving the shovels in the shed, “Sylvia” avoids exhuming its subject and merely polishes the headstone of a woman who remains, her aura intact, one of American literature’s most fascinating figures.