When approached with the idea of a Sylvia Plath biopic, Plath's surviving daughter and literary executor Frieda Hughes not only refused to cooperate with the producers, but also publicly denounced the project in verse. ("Now they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven / Orphaning children.") To some extent, Hughes needn't have worried: Her mother's famous suicide, like everything else in Christine Jeffs' Sylvia, is handled with tasteful restraint. But in a larger sense, she had good reason to question the point of a Plath biopic, mainly because her mother labored so fatalistically to commit her own tortured soul to the page. By boxing Plath's poems (and those in Birthday Letters, a 1998 collection by her late husband Ted Hughes) into the conventions of middlebrow biography, Sylvia has blandly literalized her work, converting artful, suggestive verse into banal picture. Brought in as an 11th-hour replacement for another director, Jeffs doesn't supply the evocative images and textures that were scattered throughout her debut feature Rain, perhaps because she didn't have the time to conjure them. Instead, she tracks Plath's grim destiny on the path of least resistance, following not so much a trajectory as a line heading straight into the oven. In keeping with the perpetually overcast skies, Gwyneth Paltrow makes a glum and petulant Plath, though even the warmest actresses would have trouble making such colossal angst seem accessible. Before getting bogged down in the muck, Sylvia opens with the heady swoon of Plath meeting fellow poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) at a party in Cambridge, England–the lustful beginnings of one of literature's most tumultuous unions. Shortly after their shotgun wedding leads to separate teaching jobs in the U.S., Plath's latent inner demons begin to surface, triggered by the humiliation of watching Hughes attract attention from both the literati and his moon-eyed female students. Even as Plath's woes are channeled into great poetry and her novel The Bell Jar, her creative triumphs are stifled by the burden of mothering two children and weathering an affair that will ruin her marriage. In spite of Frieda Hughes' objections, a few snippets of Plath's poetry slip into Sylvia, but they don't do the movie any favors–they just add more weight to a story that already buckles at the knees. Long a dream project for Paltrow, Sylvia seems primed to launch a million more bad adolescent poetesses, but the details of Plath's life are far from inspiring, especially when they're presented with such a dreary, affected pallor. Stripped from the sheath of her eloquent language, Plath's raw suffering finally becomes too much to bear.