Eulogistic biopics Plath and Guerin.
Sylvia's statement, such as it is, goes like this: Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) was a gifted young poet and novelist who killed herself before the world could properly applaud her talent. Her doom spiral picked up speed when she met her soulmate and future husband, the poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), a charismatic wunderkind who not only attained the early success that mostly eluded Plath, but also slept around on her. Plath's dashing pig of a husband keeps leaving for trysts without warning and staying out for hours while Plath cares for two screaming toddlers in a series of apartments and homes that are uniformly desolate, dark and buffeted by moaning winds.
(Director Christine Jeffs, cinematographer John Toon, production designer Maria Djurkovic and sound editor Christopher Ackland are talented people, but they've been watching too much David Lynch. After the opening college scenes, which are loose and bustling with life, almost every section of Sylvia feels apocalyptically decayed and depopulated, as if Plath and Hughes employed the same real estate agent as that poor couple in Eraserhead.)
I realize Sylvia isn't consciously trying to reduce Plath's life to "Hughes drove Plath crazy; men always drive women crazy," but that's what comes across. If you're familiar with the outline of Plath's life, you'll resent how filmmakers omitted or glossed over information that might have weakened their case. (Also, I don't fault Sylvia for having trouble explaining how Plath's life fed her work; writing is an inherently uncinematic process, and movies have never known how to visualize it.)
Early on, Plath warily alludes to how unbalanced girls end up in institutions hooked up to wires; in a visit to Plath's family home, Plath's mom (a nuanced, sharp performance by Paltrow's mother, Blythe Danner) warns Hughes that Plath has a history of deep emotional distress dating back to the death of her father, bee expert Otto Plath, when she was eight. But because so little of Plath's pre-Hughes misfortune is depicted onscreen, in the present tense, the viewer may be tempted to downplay its effect on the Plath-Hughes marriage. That's unfair both to the historical period the movie represents and to Hughes himself, whose womanizing certainly wounded Plath, but who nevertheless does not deserve the suggestion that he was primarily responsible for her suicide. I wish Sylvia had gone into more detail about Plath's life before she met Hughes (when she was institutionalized in the early 1950s, electroshock was much cruder and more physically damaging than it is today) and how those experiences might have guaranteed her emotional fragility no matter whom she married.
The movie has its merits. Paltrow's performance is perhaps too woozy and porcelain-doll fragile, but it's also funny and alert and mostly steers clear of cornball pandering; when Plath is roused to fits of paranoid anger, she's thrilling. The supporting cast is even better, particularly Michael Gambon, who works miracles in a tiny but pivotal role as Plath's downstairs neighbor. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that you're seeing a movie tailor-made for the youngest and most gullible members of the Plath cult-teenagers and college students who think victimhood is romantic. Anyone who's had recent, real-life experience with depression will feel as though they're watching an intentionally anachronistic period piece-Far from Heaven for depressives, minus the deadpan film-school irony.
Veronica Guerin is an outwardly less respectable movie-a fist-in-the-face docudrama about the title character (Cate Blanchett), a muckraking journalist for Dublin's Sunday Independent who was assassinated by drug dealers in 1996. But I admired it. Blanchett has never seemed more like a movie star, probably because the filmmakers, director Joel Schumacher and screenwriters Mary Agnes Donoghue and Carol Doyle, have handed her a movie-star part.
This Guerin is a lifelong tomboy turned pigheaded crusader who thinks drugs are destroying the fabric of her city and will do whatever it takes to drive the dealers out. She's not a stereotypically heroic type; she's just a smart, tough woman who, for a variety of reasons, has no internal censor and little regard for her own safety. Boldly or perhaps stupidly, she reports on Dublin's drug trade by walking right up to dealers, enforcers and bosses and asking them point-blank questions about the details of their trade. To get around Ireland's libel laws, which are much stricter than ours, Guerin identifies criminals by their street names. (Their ranks include the heroin dealer Martin Cahill, aka the General, whose exploits have been chronicled in two features, including John Boorman's The General.)
Blanchett is smashingly effective as Guerin-a hardboiled dame with a Paul Newman smirk, narcissistic enough to care what people think of her but righteous enough to risk herself in the name of all that's right. Schumacher's direction is plain and simple-a mix of tightly framed widescreen close-ups and chaotic handheld action scenes-and he adopts an old-fashioned, moralistic tone that's bracing precisely because you don't see it movies very often. Unlike Blow, this movie doesn't romanticize drugs or drug dealers, nor does it hypocritically try to have it both ways (the strategy of the 1983 Scarface, a stylistically brilliant, morally two-faced movie that gets a free pass from the Paulettes because it's a De Palma picture).
If anything, Guerin goes far (probably too far) in the opposite direction, caricaturing drugs and dealers as demonic scum who intimidate law-abiding citizens while making a buck off their clients' moral and chemical weaknesses. First among scum is druglord John Gilligan, chillingly played by Gerard McSorley as a whoremongering bully with two moods: blank-faced silence and murderous rage.
Guerin wades into battle against them, a vigilante who uses words instead of bullets-a force of nature sketched in the jagged lines of a 1970s movie hero. She dies, but not in vain; after her murder, Irish law was changed to allow cops to seize dealers' assets, and the change drove some dealers off the streets and others out of the country. But unlike, say, Popeye Doyle or even Dirty Harry, Guerin isn't permitted any deeply unpleasant qualities, much less major complications. She's depicted as a fine wife and mother whose worst traits are a workaholic tendency, a fondness for the spotlight, a disregard for her own safety and habitual lateness-in other words, movie-hero flaws.
Contrast this to a lesser known but more complex retelling of the Guerin story: the 1998 movie When the Sky Falls starring Joan Allen, based on a script cowritten by Guerin prior to her death. That movie showed us a more myopic, flirty, manipulative version of Guerin-half do-gooder, half careerist; a fanatic so intent on getting the story that she sometimes took a child along while she interviewed criminals.
Did Veronica Guerin producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the rah-rah action mogul behind Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down, order the filmmakers to sand off the heroine's rough edges? Whoever's to blame, the movie is a mixed bag and a missed opportunity-stirring, but a tad cartoony. (The script also cheats by changing the dealers' main cash source from marijuana to heroin, presumably to avoid alienating pot smokers.) Still, I preferred Veronica Guerin to Sylvia, for personal and perhaps simplistic reasons. Sylvia Plath died; Veronica Guerin died for a cause.