A. Alvarez, a British literary critic and poetry editor, maps "the grand, dark continent" of suicide in his book The Savage God (1972). His argument centers around the belief that the artist desperately seeks to come to terms with death in order to be at large for life. Yet for many poets, painters, and novelists (Arthur Rimbaud, Vincent Van Gogh, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf), suicide became a capitulation to the "Savage God," a cruel testimony to "the obstinate core of blankness and insentience which no amount of creative optimism and effort can wholly breakdown or remove." In his harrowing account of poet Sylvia Plath's suicide, Alvarez reveals a personal involvement acknowledging that he was probably one of the last people to see her alive. Plath sought to "exorcise the death she had summoned up in her poems." Yet her will to crack through the veil of death eventually led her to take her own life.

Alvarez is a character in this film about the life and death of Sylvia Plath directed by Christine Jeffs (Rain) and written by John Brownlow based on Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. In 1956, the American poet (Gwyneth Paltrow) is in England studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. After reading one of his poems, she can't wait to meet the Yorkshire-born Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig). Their sexual connection is immediate and, of course, they also share a love of poetry and the creative life of the mind. They marry within a few months, and Sylvia takes Ted back to America to meet her mother (Blythe Danner). She tells him about her daughter's suicide attempt three years earlier and urges him to be good to her.

Sylvia accepts a teaching job in the States and tries to find the inspiration for and time to write poetry. When Ted's first collection of poems is published to great acclaim, she has to fight back her jealousy. But a bigger problem is his obvious need for the adulation of all the young women who flock around him. To solidify their marriage, they return to England in 1959 and begin a family. When her first volume of poetry is published, she is stunned by the paucity of reviews.

Over the years, Sylvia becomes increasingly isolated as she raises their two children in a small farm house in Devon while Ted continues to write and give poetry readings. However, when Sylvia finds out that her husband is having an affair with Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), a mutual friend who is married, she is cut to the quick. Their soul mate connection shattered, Ted and Sylvia separate with her keeping the children. Facing a life of loneliness and ignominy, she finds her muse and creates some of the finest poems of her career. She shares them with poetry editor Al Alvarez (Jared Harris), who loves what she's done but is concerned about her mood swings. He is especially unsettled when she looks him in the eye and says that she is thinking of taking a lover.

The anxieties and pain that Sylvia feels when her marriage to her soul mate falls apart is vividly conveyed by Gwyneth Paltrow. We also sense her deep need to express herself through her art; when the words don't come, she is bereft; when they do, she is inspired. But we also get an inkling of ongoing fascination with suicide. The thematic core of this film may best be expressed in this thought by Albert Camus: "Suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art."