Monday, Apr. 02, 1979

Under Glass

By Frank Rich

THE BELL JAR

Directed by Larry Peerce

Screenplay by Marjorie Kellogg

According to Woody Allen in Annie Hall, Sylvia Plath was "an interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misrepresented as romantic by the college-girl mentality." True enough, but the college-girl mentality would be far preferable to the Hollywood intelligence on display in the film version of The Bell Jar. This movie transforms Plath's savagely autobiographical 1963 novel from a psychological nightmare into a kitsch daydream.

Plath's book, set in 1953, is about Esther Greenwood, an overachieving Seven Sisters undergraduate who careers into madness while spending the summer as a guest editor at a New York women's magazine. The movie is respectful to many of the plot details, but almost nothing else. Instead of Plath's tough, specific prose and wrenching internal soliloquies, Screenwriter Marjorie Kellogg offers flattened-out caricatures, banal mad scenes, idle mean-spiritedness and an insistent lesbian subtext. It is as if Virginia Woolfs The Waves had been rewritten by Jacqueline Susann. Yet even Susann would have pumped a little zest into this act of literary desecration.

Some of Kellogg's alterations are shocking. Buddy (Jameson Parker), a well-meaning but silly suitor in the book, is now a dolt who tries to force himself sexually on Esther. Jay Cee (Barbara Barrie), Esther's boss at Ladies' Day magazine, has been changed into an anti-intellectual closet homosexual. Even the genuinely seamy scenes in the novel, including Esther's suicide attempt, have been augmented by cheap effects that destroy their original credibility.

Larry Peerce (Goodbye, Columbus) directs the script for all it is worth, which is not much. The cinematography is shadowy, washed out and at times misfocused. The editing is so jangled that it is occasionally unclear where a scene is taking place. Esther's shrieking bouts are often accompanied by creepy music that would be more appropriate to Carrie.

Except for Mary Louise Weller, who is funny and sexy as Esther's Southern pal Doreen, the cast is ineffectual. Hassett is a catastrophe. Though this 30-year-old actress is playing a heroine in her early 20s, she has been made up to look around 38. Her monologues about death come across as the self-dramatizing tirades of a spoiled brat; her poetry readings sound like the speeches of a candidate for student council office. It says a lot about Hassett's performance that half an hour into The Bell Jar, one is tempted to start rooting for Esther Greenwood to do herself in.

-- Frank Rich

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