The Bell Jar is a 1979 American drama film based on Sylvia Plath's 1963 book The Bell Jar. It was directed by Larry Peerce, and stars Marilyn Hassett and Julie Harris. The story follows a young woman's summer in New York City working for a women's magazine, her return home to New England, and her subsequent psychological breakdown within the context of the difficulties of the 1950s—ranging from the Rosenbergs' execution, to the disturbing aspects of pop culture, to the distraction of predatory college boys.
of The New York Times was unimpressed, stating that the film's portrayal of Esther was "disastrous because it is the character's imaginative life that leads her to a collapse, and the movie barely even goes skin-deep. The audience isn't given the slightest clue about Esther's quirks, her fears, her peculiarly distorted notion of herself." The film has a "way of spelling things out ad nauseam and still not making them clear." Even where it should have flourished, like in descriptions of Esther's life in New York, "there's no satirical edge to any of this, and no dramatic edge either. It all simply plods along, en route to a nervous collapse that manages to seem perfectly unwarranted by the time it finally occurs." Variety wrote, "Despite some decent performances, 'The Bell Jar,' based on the late poet Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel, evokes neither understanding or sympathy for the plight of its heroine... As played by Marilyn Hassett, who has a cool, 'Seventeen' magazine kind of prettiness, Esther emerges as a selfish, morbid little prig." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 1 star out of 4 and called it "downright laughable, a stormy TV soap opera without that genre's sense of humor. 'The Bell Jar' is more than just a bad movie. It's a bad movie based on a book that has meant much to many, and they will be bitterly disappointed." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film "would be ideal material for Ingmar Bergman, or more appropriately, since it is an American work, for the Woody Allen of 'Interiors.' It cries for imagery and stylization—some kind of visual expression of Esther's perceptions and torments, but Peerce's approach is resolutely literal... Luckily, Marilyn Hassett's Esther is involving and thoroughly convincing—if you're prepared to share her frequent pain at merely being alive." Judith Martin of The Washington Post wrote the film seemed "especially cruel" to kill Sylvia Plath again "by reputation," by making the heroine of her story "an elitist hysteric." Jack Kroll of Newsweek wrote that "Marjorie Kellogg's screenplay is reasonably faithful to Plath's novel on the surface, but the movie totally lacks the mythic rhythm and force underneath the book's easy, colloquial style... Marilyn Hassett looks like Plath with her fine-drawn Puritan beauty, but her clean, strong acting can't overcome the film's stifling conventionality of style." Penelope Gilliatt of The New Yorker wrote, "A lot that is serious and troubled about insanity has been written in world literature, painted, and also dealt with on film. This picture is merely hysterical."
Lawsuit
After the film's release, Dr. Jane V. Anderson, a Boston psychiatrist, claimed she was portrayed as the character "Joan" and filed a lawsuit. In the film, Joan attempts to get Esther to agree to a suicide pact, an incident which is not in the book. Joan is implied to be a lesbian in Plath's novel, although this is never explicitly stated. Dr. Anderson's lawyer said the film portrayal "has grossly damaged her reputation as a practising psychiatrist and a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty." The lawsuit was settled in 1987 for $150,000. The British Library holds the archive of poetry, diary entries, correspondence and copies of legal documents relating to the lawsuit, which also sheds light on the publication of The Bell Jar in the US, and the difficulties surrounding the film adaption.
