In a surprising scene from "Sylvia," the Sylvia Plath biopic opening this week, Gwyneth Paltrow, playing the late poet, perches on the couch of her confidante, writer Al Alvarez. She wears a simple, modish black shift, a double-strand of pearls with matching pearl earrings, and a priceless expression of yearning. Rumpling through a pack of cigarettes, she asks Alvarez, played by Jared Harris, for a match.
"I didn't know you smoked," he says, nonplussed.
"I don't. I'm trying to learn," she says.
"How glamorous," he replies, wryly.
Glamorous -- the adjective jars when applied to Plath. Granted, a certain undeniable allure has always attached itself to the Plath persona. The lines "I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air," from Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" inspired a run on henna among her man-eating disciples in the 1970s. (Plath herself stayed an artificial blond until her final days, when she let her hair return to its natural brown.) But isn't it a bit farfetched to think of the stormy, suicidal poet and feminist icon as a paragon of glamour?
Not with Gwyneth Paltrow filling the role.When the perennial Vogue cover girl stepped into Plath's size-10 pumps, the poet's style quotient immediately ascended.
Also adding polish to Plath's image in the film are her soigne clothes by costume designer Sandy Powell. Ms. Powell won an Oscar for her work on "Shakespeare in Love." More recently, she designed the costumes for Todd Haynes' Douglas Sirk homage, "Far from Heaven"; the 1950s fashions Ms. Powell created for that movie are a mainstay in the first half of "Sylvia" as well.
Ms. Powell's masterstroke is to make Plath's character arc felt through the evolution of her dress. Before her marriage to Ted Hughes, Plath is clothed almost entirely in shades of red. She twirls through the party at which she first meets Hughes (and bites him on the cheek, drawing blood) in a raspberry polka-dot sleeveless party dress with a full skirt and a matching redand-pink headband (a true-to-life detail). In her more casual outfits, Ms. Paltrow sports a salmon cashmere twin-set and a fire-engine red toggle coat. When Plath and Hughes get married, she even walks down the aisle in -- scandal! -- a claret-colored satin coatdress-cumwedding gown. Though visually compelling, it's unclear whether the scarlet motif is meant to reflect Plath's passion, or presage her later status as the wronged woman, or -- as is most likely -- both.
As Plath and Hughes's marriage sours, the palette for Plath's costume grows cooler: Red gives way to melancholic blue and dour green. This change is played up by the arrival of the glamorous Assia Wevill, Plath's rival in Hughes' affection.Wevill's clothes foretell her role as Hughes' mistress. In addition to the shock of scarlet lipstick setting off her raven mane, Weevil wears red in every scene of the movie. (If only Plath had continued to do the same, the fashion-sensitive viewer protests!)
It may seem sacrilegious to harp on Plath's wardrobe, but in fact "fashion plate" was a role Plath openly courted when she invaded staid England with her full set of Samsonite luggage and brassy blond hair. As a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, Plath wrote fashion features for the school's student newspaper, "Varsity" -- and appeared in the photographs accompanying her pieces as a model. She clipped one such article, with a picture of herself wearing a white bathing suit with black polka dots and white pumps, and sent it to her mother with the annotation, "From the front page of Varsity! with love, from Betty Grable!"
It's fitting in another sense that the photogenic Paltrow should step in to fill Plath's shoes.Though Plath was by all reports attractive (if strapping) in person, in photographs, her face tends to look pinched and puffy -- especially next to the handsome, brooding Hughes.Plath described Hughes as "a large, hulking, healthy Adam," and indeed, reports by Alvarez and others attest that the Heathcliffian Hughes made many a grown woman weak in the knees.
While the cult of Hughes's handsomeness has proceeded unabated, Plath's reputation as a beauty is either forgotten or contradicted. "All the photographs of her disappoint me," Janet Malcolm wrote in "The Silent Woman," her brutal 1994 vivisection of the Plath/Hughes biography industry. For Ms. Malcolm, a failure of attractiveness was only half of the issue; photographs of Plath create a dissonance between the feral persona evoked in the poetry -- "queen, priestess, magician's girl" -- and the flat images of a plain and pleasant-looking woman. The photographs reveal none of the ambition, energy, or beauty that might have attracted Hughes.
And if Hughes is to be believed, Plath herself was ruefully aware of the discrepancy. In the poem "18 Rugby Street," from Hughes's 1998 collection of poems about Plath, "Birthday Letters," he wrote of Plath's "boxer's nose . . . That made every camera your enemy, / The jailor of your vanity, the traitor / In your Sexual Dreams Incorporated."
In some sense, then, Plath is done right by Ms. Paltrow (certainly a more agreeable choice of actress than Meg Ryan, who for years made vocal her desire to play the poet). Depicted by the elegant and aristocratic-looking Ms. Paltrow, Plath emerges as the figure she arguably wanted to be but never quite was -- golden and polished, with cheekbones that could slice men in two.