Time was, before belly-button haute couture, poets could be superstars. Wordsworth reluctantly managed it, and Byron's deeds were spicier news than his pen, the same as Wilde's. Whitman aspired to bard-dom but fell short, while Dylan (Thomas, not Bob) wenched and whiskeyed a path to the White Horse and legend.

This public figure thing can be deceptive, however, for there are poets and there are poets, and cases where the life carries the literature, making it appear to shine. Example: empowerment discovered, promoted and overestimated Sylvia Plath perhaps will stage an encore with New Zealander Christine Jeffs's Sylvia. This first John Brownlow screenplay to be filmed, the story focuses intensely on the relationship between two people -- the title's American Fulbright student and as yet unknown poetess and novelist (Gwyneth Paltrow) and future unsentimental Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) -- from their very first meeting at Cambridge, through their passion and almost immediate marriage and its increasingly stormy nature, two children, a miscarriage, separation, to her suicide two weeks shy of seven years later.

"Very much a love story" in strictly chronological fashion, the movie could have been a perceptive study of clashing egos, the desire for recognition or fame, and of a couple's capacity for caring deeply yet destructively.

What results, alas, is a mishmash which pretends to atmosphere with snips and snaps of Shakespeare, Auden, Belloc, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Lowell, Hughes, Plath and -- declaimed to cows from a punt on the Cam -- Chaucer ("I prefer him to Milton"). Insistent that what we have here is not only Life but Art, both dialogue and Gabriel Yared's overwrought menacing score are shouted.

The problem is not with the sensual Hughes, who has long received generally bad, likely unfair press. Nor is it the facile casting of actress Paltrow's real-life mother Blythe Danner as the poetess' film-mother Aurelia, a ploy that may be overlooked only because her screen-time is negligible. Sylvia's Sylvia is simply unappetizing and unsympathetic. Mental imbalances and attempted suicides -- often and again, she reverts to three failed tries -- should create a natural pity in the beholder, but, meant to convey dark despair, Paltrow's ill-humored moues are shallow, her varied coiffures too many and her actions at best indicative of a personality to steer clear of.

Literally (and in heavy-handed cinema metaphor) sitting in darkness coming from the light, she hungers after literary fame. Her praises of Ted, whom she bites and seduces from minute one (he is tipsy and not unwilling) and does again after their separation, only thinly mask her jealousy, just as her sexual possessiveness and insulting behavior drive him to Assia (Amira Casar). Obsessed with "Death & Co.," she is a denial of joy or life even in the act of setting out to seduce mutual poet/editor friend Al Alvarez (Jared Harris), who is punished with sappy lines.

Stubbly Byronic, Hughes's great failing (for her) is his being alive in a way she cannot be, while his great sin (for us) is leaving two toddlers with a dangerous mother who saw the world's "bad dream . . . stoppered as a dead baby" and who forgets the children while imposing on a too kindly downstairs neighbor (Michael Gambon). A few dishes washed, alternately grandiose and skimpy meal preparations, children's underpants hung up to dry, student papers to be graded, are meant to convey a sense of creative spark overwhelmed by mundane demands, although surely other geniuses have survived despite having to change bed linen.

Absurdly referring to the couple as "literary giants, . . .two of the most influential writers of the 20th century" and to Hughes as the "Clint Eastwood of poets," publicity would have it believed that cast and filmmakers have long been sold on Plath's (and/or Ted's) oeuvre. That Plath was a wounded, disturbed woman with a talent that might have matured, is true. But while emotional problems have often been considered on-screen, sometimes well, and gifted or ungifted creators have inspired a number of biopics, Sylvia succeeds in neither direction.  

(Released by Focus Features and rated "R" for sexuality/nudity and language.)