Sylvia Movie Review:


Gwyneth Paltrow returns the silver screen as she embarks to bring life to legendary poet Sylvia Plath. The woman’s life was a tormented but strong one. Can the Oscar-winning actress embody such a troubled woman?

The film begins with the meeting of college classmates Sylvia Plath (Paltrow) and emerging poet Ted Hughes (Road to Perdition’s Daniel Craig). Their admiration for the written word and their involvement in the college’s poetry scene make the couple an ideal match.

After a whimsical affair, Plath and Hughes marry and the couple journey home to America where Hughes is exposed to the American way of life. Hughes is confronted by Plath’s protective mother Aurelia (Paltrow’s real mother Blythe Danner) and a dark secret from Plath’s childhood is revealed.

Eventually Hughes wins a prestigious poetry award and the couple has two children. Plath’s life is shuffled to the background much to her dismay as she watches the world around her crumble. She seems to be losing her philandering husband and her passion for poetry is deeply weaning. Plath struggles to cultivate a single poem while raising the children for a non-existent husband. How does Plath eventually sculpt out her masterpieces and why aren’t they at least some part of the real woman’s epic struggle here?

The sadness, screaming and depression housed within this film feels like an anvil dropping on your head from 10 stories above. Paltrow’s performance as Plath is poignant and some times powerful but also extremely hard to watch. For me the weakest part of “Sylvia” is Daniel Craig’s Ted. His portrayal of the poet is bland, heartless and inept. We hate this guy from the first smooching scene with Plath. There are some scenes which make him at least appear human or have a soul but for the most part I was puzzled to what Plath ever saw in the man.

This couple was not “Ozzie and Harriet” but instead some sort of twisted version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Speaking of Woolf, the best scene in the film is when Plath and Hughes entertain some friends for dinner. The scene captures Paltrow’s portrayal of Plath to a tee and develops into a battle of wills.

Aside from the performances, the bio-pic of “Sylvia” is utterly forgettable. The lives of these legendary poets must have been utter disaster and it can be concluded by this film that Sylvia’s death was caused indirectly by Hughes himself. With that conclusion, one can see why the estates of Hughes and Plath both decided not to include actual poems by the couple in the movie. In my opinion, that omission is what cripples “Sylvia”. For an audience to get connected with a biopic, the film must allow the viewer to embrace why we love the film’s subject so much. We needed to hear from the actual Sylvia and Ted and know what was going on in their hearts through their works.

There is so much to scream about when addressing a film like “Sylvia”. We needed a more heart-felt and thoughtful interpretation of this extraordinary woman than a soulless biopic which is what we got.

(1.5 out of 5)

So Says the Soothsayer

Dean Kish

This biopic about the relationship between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has the requisite dark tone and superb performances, but it feels simplistic in its examination of the tortured mind of a gifted woman. It begins in mid-50s Cambridge, where Plath and Hughes (Paltrow and Craig) meet in a flurry of artistic appreciation and uncontrolled lust. They marry and move to Boston, where Plath struggles with her past (Paltrow's real mother Danner plays her harsh on-screen mother wonderfully). But with the distractions of motherhood and work as a teacher she loses her muse ... while Hughes builds both acclaim and sexy young women fans. So back to Britain they go, where Hughes finds even more notoriety and Plath descends even deeper her artistic struggle. This drives her away from her more professional, easy-going husband, until her desperately tragic suicide in 1963 at age 30.

Like Titanic, we know from the start where this is going, and all credit to the filmmakers that they keep us gripped, drawing out emotional resonance and letting Paltrow and Craig create fascinating characters along the way. After a series of fairly breezy films, Plath is a seriously meaty role for Paltrow to sink her chops into, and she's remarkably complex as a woman fighting so many inner demons that she loses sight of the world around her. So it's a pity that the script distils Plath down to one basic driving emotion: jealousy for both her husband's greater success (she's dismissed I Britain as substandard because she's American and female) and his perceived infidelity. Since the script includes references to her extremely troubled childhood, there's surely more to her than this, but the filmmakers don't seem to trust the audience with the more uncomfortable, ambiguous truth.

That said, Leffs directs the film inventively, somehow capturing the joy and happiness while maintaining the much darker shadows that threaten to overwhelm the characters at any moment. This razor's edge is present through the whole film, even in the poetic wordplay of the couple's friends. Although there aren't many friends; the film is insular and very tightly focussed on Sylvia and Ted. Even their children are barely here. And sometimes this tight focus gets a bit silly, including one ludicrous movie-sex scene near the end. Even so, there's a raw beauty here. Like Plath's poems, which don't have nearly enough screen time, the film is, to quote a character, "beautiful, frightening, haunting."

Rich Cline

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