Women on the verge (of an Oscar)

Why do all actresses want to play mad women? Why are none of these stories American? And why do we rarely see men crack up on film? David Thomson explores Hollywood's growing appetite for (feminine) creative angst

It's not so much cynical as a plain admission of the facts to say that there is now a Sylvia Plath industry. When the 30-year-old American wife, poet and mother committed her head to a London oven in February 1963, the matter was noted in the press and it was a shock to London's literary world. But Plath was not really famous back then. Forty years later, as Gwyneth Paltrow is about to play Plath in Sylvia, it's clear that Plath is not just the most widely known poet in the world, she is the archetypal heroine for anyone trying to balance a woman's work with her life, or her genius with her ordinariness.

I haven't seen Sylvia yet, but most of us feel we already know the Plath drama. There have been so many biographies, analyses and plays; there is even Kate Moses' Wintering, a novel written as if from inside Plath's head. In part perhaps because of the defensive reticence of her late husband, Ted Hughes, her story has seldom been out of the press. Literary scholars and feminists alike have taken every opportunity to depict Hughes as the controlling (and suppressing) male figure in the troubled woman's life. Others have argued that this particular woman was outrageous, melodramatic, self-centred and her own worst enemy. After all, she was creative, wasn't she? What else can you expect?

That's a good question, and one that the movies have trouble with, no matter that in recent years they seem obsessed with shaky, talented women. Sylvia may have been conceived before the film The Hours opened, but the marketing of the picture (and its ambition for Oscars) are bound to be based on Nicole Kidman's extraordinary impersonation of Virginia Woolf. Except that it's not really impersonation. Kidman may have schooled herself to write left-handed, like Mrs Woolf; she may have read every word the writer had written; and she certainly went a long way to hide her own looks. But she doesn't actually look like Virginia Woolf; and she doesn't sound like her. Indeed, Woolf's very languid, elite voice would be alienating in a film today - it soars on privilege, class, snobbery and so on.

Salma Hayek was alleged to be in love with Frida, and so determined to make the film of that name (directed by Julie Taymor) that she would allow nothing to stop her. So you could say that her acting is heartfelt, except that the real Frida Kahlo was physically frail and constantly in pain, whereas the obligatory nude scenes from Hayek (a superbly appointed body) reveal a voluptuousness that is simply too conventional to bring across the pain.

On the other hand, Judi Dench and Kate Winslet conspired in a quite magical evocation of Iris Murdoch in Richard Eyre's Iris. Dench could make herself look like the older Murdoch, and she has both the face and the skill to let us share in the slippage of Alzheimer's. Winslet doesn't resemble the young Iris (photographs show a rather overweight doe with a timid sensuality and an intellectual witchery that are beyond acting), but Eyre's subtle approach and the larger scheme of white-grey-watery imagery did begin to conjure up the romanticism of Murdoch's fictional world.

In Tom & Viv (not a very enjoyable or comfortable film) Miranda Richardson may have given the best performance of all as the clinically hysterical woman who was unlucky enough to marry TS Eliot. But Richardson is matchless: don't forget how much her Vanessa helped Kidman's Virginia in The Hours. Nor could you fault Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths in Hilary and Jackie - the story of cellist Jacqueline du Pré and her less talented sister. But if you asked me which film started this modern genre, I'd opt for Christopher Hampton's horribly neglected Carrington, where Emma Thompson gave maybe her best performance as Dora Carrington, fringe Bloomsbury figure, painter and lover to Lytton Strachey, and eventual suicide victim.

It's striking how far, even with the aid of American studio money, so many of these films spring from English writers and directors, and from models of English artistic life. There are similar figures from American history who have not yet been filmed: Zelda Fitzgerald is a notable case, a writer in her own right, and some say driven to madness in part by Scott's subtle undermining of her. Others say she was a spoiled bitch who went mad for reasons that were all her own. As yet there's been no film on Zelda - just a forgotten TV film from 1976 (directed by Englishman Anthony Page) in which Tuesday Weld was phenomenal. (Come to think of it, Ms Weld would herself be an ideal subject for such a movie now.)

But America has not made a film about the photographer Diane Arbus (a suicide), about the jazz singer Susannah McCorkle, who threw herself out of a window a couple of years ago when her record company dropped her, or Gelsey Kirkland, the Balanchine ballerina who had a breakdown when dance and life got out of step. An American studio might say that those dames aren't really famous enough, or - more importantly - not quite suicidal enough. Or even that they're not quite what the world expects of American women.

To this day, even with a few women like Sherry Lansing and Laura Ziskin in positions of executive power, the Hollywood community likes to leave its wives at home in the morning, secure in the knowledge that their day will be shopping, lunch and tennis - so that they can come to dinner looking tanned, chic, and with fresh gossip. A lot of those wives (armed with prenuptial agreements) play the game the old-fashioned way. It follows that in its essential imaginative view of women, Hollywood remains terminally trapped in the past.

Even when Hollywood deals with lawyers, rather than artists, it is better to look like Reese Witherspoon or Julia Roberts than, say, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor or Ruth Bader Ginzburg. Of course, women of that judicial experience seldom get to have movies made about them - it's far easier for older guys, and they get Julia, Reese and other women 20-to-30 years their junior as comfort. Hollywood is still not easy with the concept of women being artistically talented; and it is sentimental enough to hope that all women will be stable, nurturing and eternally fond - isn't that what weary men deserve?

It's not easy to think of mainstream Hollywood films to compare with The Hours or Sylvia - but neither is there a long list of entertainment pictures about female American artists. I can think of a couple: Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, where Jennifer Jason Leigh did a fine job suggesting the tough wit and the fragile ego of Dorothy Parker; and maybe, best of all, Frances, where Jessica Lange's bold performance left one in real doubt as to whether actress Frances Farmer was more the victim of harsh times and a stupid mother or of the turmoil in her own head.

Yes, I have deliberately omitted one shaky lady - a genre unto herself: Marilyn Monroe. There have been far too many books and films about her - but she is a lot more lowest common denominator than Virginia Woolf or Dora Carrington. Even so, the Marilyn scenarios are notable for the ways in which they jump at the melodrama of involvement with the Kennedys or the Mob. Far fewer treatments reckon that her unhappiness came from her difficulty in getting the kind of acting roles she wanted. Whereas, it's a tribute to Kidman's Woolf, and to the overall atmosphere of The Hours, that we can believe that woman might face an ultimate desolation because she can't get a sentence right.

Is that crazy or extreme? Is every act of suicide a sign of lost reason or balance? Those are much more unsettling questions, and again it is the virtue of The Hours that it cherishes life and sees how good faith might end it. It is easier for an ordinary audience - or one not engaged in creative work - to identify with the Julianne Moore character, a woman with a loving child and a devoted husband, yet someone unable to feel herself reached or fulfilled by them. Is that self-indulgence, irresponsibility, or might it be a sane response to the pressures?

When Sylvia Plath died, she left two young children behind, and I'm sure that many of Ted Hughes' actions were meant to protect those kids from further damage. It remains to be seen whether Gwyneth Paltrow can make the oven seem plausible or sympathetic. Or is the viewer, like the reader, left in his or her own struggles to reconcile the ferocity of Plath's late poems with the larger wisdom that poets - and artists - are about communication? Aren't they?

Funnily enough, these terrible crises are something that the movies prefer to settle upon women. The final frenzy of despair is something men like to think they can resist. In films, the only such suicide that I can recall is the conclusion to Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life where Kirk Douglas's effort to capture crows in the blue sky above dry harvested fields brings on the crisis of suicide.

No one likes to hear of suicides - it is an action that somehow reflects on us all. But no one is required to be "artistic" or creative, no matter how much our bourgeois culture honours those things. We want to hope that people will live long, and essentially happy or reconciled lives. That is the contract we pass on to our children. And at the same time we want to think that we cherish those who describe the limits - high and low - of experience. We may even want to be like them.

In fact, lives are often nasty, brutish and short - harder than we can take. It may be one of the subtlest reflections of a "civilised" society as to how well it can live with the notion of those who take an early departure. And I think it says a great deal about our history that women are the pioneers of that dangerous ground. Statistically, women are less often "artists" than men. We can argue why that is. But equally, they are so much more often our best desperate subjects.