Julia Stiles in The Bell Jar
Bourne bait Julia Stiles has signed up to play Esther Greenwood in an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s classic 1963 novel The Bell Jar. Tristine Skyler, a playwright and actress whose most prominent screen credits seem to be the Dominique Swain movie The Intern and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, is writing the thing, and Plum Pictures is producing it. Get a load of what Plum exec. Celine Rattray had to say about the project: “Esther Greenwood has a strong outlook on life, and we’re really looking to bring out the humor in the character. We don’t want to do a depressing descent into the world of suicide.” Wow. You might want to back up and read that again. This is a book about a woman (loosely based on Plath herself) whose struggle with clinical depression is so overwhelming that it drives her to madness and leads her to be subjected to gruesome, primitive shock therapy treatments. Throughout the course of the book, she attempts suicide several times. And they’re going to turn it into, what, Mrs. Doubtfire?
The producers hope to get the project going next year, and no other cast members have been signed as of yet. Stiles will serve as a producer of the film, along with Rattray, Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Galt Niederhoffer. The story also notes that Stiles has been trying to bring this book to the screen for several years, but why? Here’s hoping that either Variety or Rattray got it wrong about the whole “uplifting” angle, which is so laughable that I’m sure the Plath estate will go bananas when they catch wind of it. The last big-screen adaptation of The Bell Jar was back in 1979.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
I don’t think they are totally on the wrong track with this. Bear in the mind that the book was, in some respects, supposed to be a satirical look at femininity in the mid-’50s. The Bell Jar was — as Plath herself called it — a potboiler… and if i recall correctly, she was deeply influenced by Salinger when she wrote it.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:19 am
wha-what?! This is absurd. I think the term ‘uplifting’ has to be used very loosely, verrrrry loosely. The book is basically an autobiography of Plath when she received an intern job at a well known fashion mag, (forget if it’s vogue or vanity fair) as a Smith student. I love this book and I hope they don’t make it into a cheeky chick film because of one famous female writer that people right now want to cash in on. I saw ‘Sylvia’ with Gwyneth Paltrow and to my dismay was a total emotionally lack lustor 2 hours, which I would never expect from Sylvia herself. That too seemed to be a grab for an oscar nom and not for the story itself. Please, why do all good things in our culture get tainted by inexperienced, money grabbing movie execs!!!
October 8th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
That little pop up thing that we get when we roll over a link is really really really annoying.
August 20th, 2009 at 3:01 am
I think they’re actually totally right about this. I read the Bell Jar throughout my teenage years and into adulthood and although it deals with the misery of Esther’s depression, what I always related to about it was her satirical, sarcastic and ascerbic comments about the world around her. Lots of the imagery she uses and the commentary she makes on the minutiae of every day life is very witty. People wrongly claim the book is depressing. I actually think it’s quite an amusing look at the outside world from underneath the bell jar. Though the subject matter is often not the most uplifting thing in the world, Esther’s way of seeing the world certainly can be, if you look at it in the right way. Sure, being suicidal and feeling stifled by the stale air of the bell jar is not much fun for Esther, but the idosyncratic, almost detatched and matter-of-fact factway she describes the harrowing events that take place often made me smile as a teenager. What the book does so well is capture that adolescent ‘me against the world’ feeling in a very funny way. I hope this is what they mean to recreate in the movie.
Anyone who calls the novel bleak and depressing has failed to see the really important element of satire and humour that I think is a large part of what that novel has to offer. They really should go back and give it another read.