This story of the passionate poet Sylvia Plath has little passion or poetry

Out of the ash she rises with red hair, eating men like air. In her latest resurrection, Lady Lazarus, poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), arrives in the form of Gwyneth Paltrow, star of filmmaker Christine Jeffs' portrait of the artist as a glowing meteor doomed to vaporize in Earth's atmosphere.

Make that a double portrait, for Jeffs' actual subject is the volatile marriage of Plath and Ted Hughes, also a poet (and in 1984 named poet laureate of England), whose first wife, Plath, and his second, Assia Wevill, took their own lives.

Despite an exceptional performance by Paltrow, whose Plath is a layer cake of infinite intelligence and bottomless need, Jeffs' film is an icy affair lacking the fever of Plath's and Hughes' poems.

For the most part it lacks the poems, too. This is because the Plath and Hughes estates didn't permit quotation of the poems beyond the "fair use" limit of brief excerpts.

Although Jeffs conjures visual correlatives for Plath's water imagery and Hughes' feral animal evocations, a movie about poets without their poetry is like a movie about painters without their paintings. Imagine Frida without the vibrant, erotically charged canvases of Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

What Sylvia lacks in giving us its subjects' art it compensates for by speculating about their conjoined heart. As such, it's the latest entry in the fast-growing scenes-from-a-marriage genre about two-career couples competing in the same field. This includes Frida, Pollock (about artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner), Iris (writers Iris Murdoch and John Bayley), and Hilary and Jackie (musicians Jacqueline du Pre and Daniel Barenboim).

These are pictures about specific marriages and also about marriage itself. Like these other, more artistically resolved films, Sylvia chronicles the healthy symbiosis of wedlock and also its unhealthy degeneration. It's a cautionary tale about the perils of two careers and no caretaker.

Working from John Brownlow's evenhanded screenplay that steadfastly refuses to see Plath as a victim and Hughes as a victimizer, Jeffs is more fascinated with how the two inspired each other than how they destroyed their marriage. Given all the Plathographies out there that make her out as a feminist martyr and him as a womanizer, Sylvia is refreshing in its revisionism.

There's a telling sequence in the film, set in Cape Cod circa 1959, that struggles with the brave new world of the Hughes marriage. Hughes (played by the taciturn Daniel Craig) is the famous poet returning with rod and reel from the beach, casually telling his wife that he's caught a poem, a good one. Depressively jealous of her spouse's creative flow, the less famous poet juggles her roles as writer and wife. Although she has writer's block she whips up cakes instead of verse, an array of baked goods that makes for the one image in the film as frighteningly funny as a Plath poem.

While I admire Jeffs' film for reimagining Plath and Hughes as people instead of legends, I doubt they were as humorless as they are presented here. So suffocating, so lugubrious is the film that Sylvia didn't need to gas herself to death. Jeffs deprives her of oxygen.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

Sylvia ** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Alison Owen, directed by Christine Jeffs, written by John Brownlow, photography by John Toon, music by Gabriel Yared, distributed by Focus Features.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 mins.

Sylvia Plath. . . Gwyneth Paltrow

Ted Hughes. . . Daniel Craig

Aurelia Plath. . . Blythe Danner

Al Alvarez. . . Jared Harris

Professor Thomas. . . Michael Gambon

Parent's guide: R (sexuality, nudity, profanity)

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/NJ