Only finding its dramatic bearings on the occasions when its titular poetess gets depressed and contemplates Ending It All, Sylvia is driven by a suicide fetish. Director Christine Jeffs splashes it all up on the screen in the film's very first shot, which has Gwyneth Paltrow in close-up, intoning, in voiceover, probably the most famous lines from Sylvia Plath's ouevre: the dying-is-an-art stanzas from "Lady Lazarus." They retain their power here, but their presence right out of the box is a little disconcerting - already you get the sense that, in the hands of Jeffs and screenwriter John Brownlow, poor Sylvia never has a chance.

Poor Paltrow is not bad, really, as Plath, who is portrayed here as suspicious and insecure - not just sexually jealous, but insulated and suffocated by a blanket of sadness she's woven around herself. But that's more or less where the film's sense of character ends. Daniel Craig, playing husband Ted Hughes, has little to do besides mope around the house, deny his infidelities, and react incriminatingly upon receipt of a phone call from a ladyfriend. And the dialogue, from Brit-TV writer Brownlow, is often stupidly obvious. SYLVIA: You don't have to go. TED: [Pregnant pause.] Yes, I do.

[BRYANT: Yeesh.]

What's most maddening, perhaps, is the film's stolid refusal to consider Plath's life - or her writing - except in the way it relates directly to her relationship with Hughes, or the void left in her life when he departs. Maybe that's not a shortcoming, but a narrative strategy - Sylvia succeeds, fortunately, in refusing to romanticize her state of mind. Due attention is also given to Plath's impetus toward psychological self-destruction, such as her abrupt impulse to throw herself at the writer who panned her first book in a poetry journal (good God, this kind of behavior is enough to give a movie critic a boner). But Plath is portrayed here as not much more than an unfulfilled housewife, her life barely changed by the births of her two children and thrown away in the wake of bad love. To what degree this portrayal is accurate is beside the question - as drama it's inert, and as biography it's unilluminating.

The creatives at the helm of this one have what look like fairly respectable resumés in television, but there's little cinematic know-how in evidence. For instance, this is one of those movies that's shot in widescreen, but without much in the way of a visual strategy - the sides of the picture are useless flaps just sort of taking up space there on the wall. The closest thing to a seasoned pro working above the line on this one is ace film editor Tariq Anwar (The Wings of the Dove, American Beauty), who at least keeps the proceedings moving along. (Note that it runs a reasonable 100 minutes and realize that things could have been much, much worse.)