Today is bright, windless and brutally cold. All the clouds have been pushed past the horizon. The light hits the ground and bounces back up, picking out everything in fine bright detail. Early in the morning the haze in the sky makes the sun strike the eye like rays reflected from a bronze shield, but by noon the blue of the sky has deepened and the light becomes clear. In the city, fast food restaurants benefit the most from this kind of light, their saturated hues and primary colours leaping out cheerfully against the cold. By the end of the month they'll be spattered with the mud and slush splashed up from a thousand tires, but today, along with the blue-tinged shadows under the railway bridge, Burger King was the most beautiful thing I saw on the way to work today.

COW-CHAUCER BOAT RIDES AND BAD GAS

Last Saturday I saw Sylvia, the Plath biopic that wants to dramatize the life of the mind, can't quite, and so resorts to scenes of Gwyneth Paltrow throwing things at the wall, sobbing in parked cars and sitting around naked and in sorrow. The movie also features the most tastefully appropriate use of the word 'fuck' I've ever encountered. As she does in Shakespeare In Love, Gwyneth Paltrow takes her clothes off. Perhaps there's a rider in her contract that stipulates nudity for British settings and literary themes.

Like other artists' biopics, the film finds itself a bit hamstrung when it tries to demonstrate just what was so great about Plath's poetry. Even if there weren't estate restrictions on the use of her work, which apparently there were, it's tough to show literature on screen, because there's not much to look at that would excite anyone but typesetters. Films like Frida and Love is the Devil have a much easier time with their subjects, because a painting at least gives the viewer something to look at. It's hard to be a spectator at a page of couplets. Sometimes the film finds clever ways to communicate the joy of well-arranged language, throwing in scenes of characters reciting literature from memory - an impressive accomplishment that most students of literature today probably could not replicate. A scene with Paltrow standing in a rowboat and declaiming Chaucer to cows, unshifted vowels and odd glottals intact, has a stagey humour until you wonder if perhaps, as a member of a paying audience, you're supposed to be one of the cows. Then you realize that this sort of thing is what passed for fun at high-toned British universities in 1960, and then you no longer wonder why Plath and half of her colleagues committed suicide.

I've always wondered how you can dramatize the life of the poet when all they really do is sit still and occasionally get up to pour more coffee or hunt for the thesaurus. All the real drama and movement is invisible. So instead of Plath's poetry we get Plath's life, or rather that small but significant slice cut at both ends by Ted Hughes. Plath seems to wake up, or grow up, when she reads a Hughes poem in the morning and bites his cheek seemingly that very same evening. From then on the movie is an agonistic tale of her struggling to emerge from under the charismatic, attractive, and perpetually philandering figure of Hughes. Then she struggles to emerge from under a case of writer's block. Then comes the real struggle: two tiny children who, if the movie is to be believed, never saw a bottle being boiled or a diaper being changed by their dad. Instead the gruelling never-ending task of caring for the kids goes to Sylvia. There's a wonderful montage of her trying to get something down on paper and tend to her daughter at the same time, attempting to fit two gigantic duties into a claustrophic little flat. All you need to know about the male dominance of the canon is in that scene, wrapped a milky, towelly package.

The performances are delivered punctually by the Good Taste Truck and left discretely at the door. The only real subtlety comes from Paltrow, who plays Plath as a visionary egomaniac tucked up carefully behind a wilfully plain face. My favourite moments in the movie come when the ego slides out; the polite mask suddenly turns cruel and pointed, and for a moment you see a reptile basking on a stone, immensely satisfied with the heat. As for Craig Daniels, he mostly broods and occasionally explodes; aside from the attractive face and the guise of the sexy professor, it's hard to fathom the ferocity of Plath's love. As it is, he comes off as something of a standard rake and a cipher for Plath's overwheening obsession, which does a disservice both to Plath and the movie. And why, ultimately, must Paltrow's Plath be so helpless, so constantly frustrated and unable to write? Instead of writing, she bakes. She messes about in boats (which appears to the film's best metaphor for the act of writing: a lonely and potentially dangerous voyage, navigating with your own strength against currents of infinite power). She moons and screams and throws objects around. And in the last act of the film, during the period of Plath's life when she was producing fantastic work despite being a single mother with a sleeping disorder and a suicidal ideator for a bran, you see her... moon, scream, take pills, get naked, kill herself. Where's the writing then? Where's the goal that she strives for over the first 75 minutes?

I also think that a film with the last century's most original poets should put original words in their mouths, nein? Instead, we get Sylvia Plath whining to her mother (played by Blythe Danner, whose career from now on will be limited to playing Paltrow's mother): "Why can't you just be happy for me?" and a whole host of characters delivering a series of boring speeches on the art and importance of writing. Sylvia more properly belongs to the weepy genre of Movie-of-the-Week tales of female abandonment and mental instability. Plath deserves a better telling. Maybe a really weird fantasia about a girl imprisoned by her father in a honeycomb. Call it Get Sylvia.

parode - exode