The film moves quickly from first meeting at Cambridge where Plath was a Fullbright scholar, to the night of their consummation and confession after a night reading poetry aloud at a gathering in an all-male friend's house of Hughes's. That night, Plath tells Hughes of her first suicide attempt. How she crawled beneath the house after breaking into the lockbox with the sleeping pills and alsmot died. She is Lady Lazarus, she says to him, the risen dead.

As in life, the relationship between Hughes and Plath developed quickly, gathering intensity like a bonfire or fast moving storm. They speak of everything and see poems as "weapons", like bombs they threaten to "go off at any time." Paltrow/Plath cleverly says, "Imagine what would happen if a sonnet were to explode!" It is exactly the kind of clever banter that existed between the two in real life and has been documented by biographers time and time again, so much so ,that part of us cannot help but want a different story - the story behind the story that we know exists, because one's life is not made up of large events. In fact, it is usually the small stuff that counts the most and that hits us where we count.. That is what we remember of those who have passed, but not of those who we chose to mythologize as we have Plath and Hughes.

The film accurately portrays Plath subordinating herself somewhat to Ted - subordinating her work anyway - and putting her husband's poetry ahead of her own, devoting her time to typing up manuscripts, sending them out for rejection rejection and final approval. This would be accurate for the time and one has to see this in context. It may seem mad to some women today, but back then, in the fifties and sixties, there were many women like Plath who felt that marriage necessitated the giving up of the old self to a rebirth of self that would emerge as the nurturing mother for both children and husband. It was her job to clean and cook and when possible, see to her husband's career as well. Plath was not unusual in this and there is absolutely nothing strange about it - yet since her death, rabid groups of women have latched onto this fact as some evidence of Hughes's awful power over Plath, and a power that he enforced at that. This is simply not true. Plath was a strong character herself and whatever she did with Ted , for the most part, she did so willingly and happily. Read Letters Home and yhou'll see. Read her journal and you'll see. The issue only became an issue when Hughes broke the deal that is tacit in such an arrangement and that is that he, in return, would be a good and loyal husband.