Product Description: Explores the early romance and tempestuous marriage of poet Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. Genre: Feature Film-Drama Rating: R Release Date: 24-AUG-2004 Media Type: DVD
Amazon.com: The biting poetry and sad life of poet Sylvia Plath form the story of Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow. This subtle but fascinating movie centers around Plath's relationship with poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig, Love Is the Devil), with whom she fell aggressively in love while a student at Cambridge. Their relationship proved passionate but rocky; many of Plath's fans blame the depression that eventually led her to suicide on Hughes's infidelity. Sylvia doesn't let Hughes off the hook, but it doesn't paint Plath as a helpless victim either. Paltrow's superb performance captures the poet's fierce jealousy and artistic ambition as much as her debilitating sorrow. The movie makes no big statements about Plath's poetry, letting the troubling details of her life tell their own compelling story. Also featuring Jared Harris, Blythe Danner, and Michael Gambon; the acting is outstanding all around. --Bret Fetzer
A noble attempt, but it falls short I was concerned when I saw that Paltrow had been cast as Plath, so I avoided seeing this movie for years because I was sure she alone would derail the movie. How wrong of me - it's not that Paltrow isn't miscast, it's that the Plath she's playing isn't quite true to life. Paltrow actually does an excellent job with what she's given.
What's missing? Well, Plath's breezy, bright qualities are almost completely absent, save for some quick scenes at the beginning of the movie that only serve as a quick opportunity to show us how smitten she was with Hughes.
The movie also implies that, during her marriage, she was unable to write and when separated from Ted, she's seen scribbling furiously as though she's finally able to work on the poetry she was destined to unleash. It's clear that her later poems are her strongest because she's tapped into an energy she had not yet realized she possessed, but to imply that her married years weren't fruitful is to be unfair both to Plath and to Ted Hughes. Whether Plath fans like it or not, Sylvia looked to her husband as a mentor (even when she might have been jealous of her success) and he at least played a part in helping her to shape her voice as a writer.
This is a movie that would be critiqued widely no matter how accurate or carefully put together, but it feels like the script focuses on the great hurts inflicted upon Plath both by her mind and by her husband. Her life wasn't easy, but turning it into a spurned-wife melodrama simplifies a woman who was much deeper than that. It's possible to portray Hughes as the villain that he was while also making a movie that glosses over what draws us to Plath the most: her wonderful creative energy.
"Her own words describe her best." Having recently finished "Ariel: The Restored Edition" and "Her Husband, Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath: A Marriage", I thought I would finish off my Plath rampage with this movie. I was very disappointed. The movie was long, stuck to details of her life that probably didn't help move along the plot of the movie, and extremely melodramatic. I was dismayed and even a little embarrassedSylvia after finishing. In her introduction to "Ariel: The Restored Edition," Frieda Hughes says, "My mother's poems cannot be crammed into the mouths of actors in any filmic reinvention of her story in the expectation that they can breathe life into her again." I would say this film did a terrible job at attempting to "breathe life into her again," and ruined the image of Sylvia Plath for those whose only impression of her is this film. I full heartedly agree with Frieda, "Her own words describe her best."
It should have been titled "Sylvia and Ted" I am an avid Plath reader. I also like to learn about her life from a variety of sources, so when I heard of this film I was super excited before I saw it; disappointed after I saw it.
Many incidents were confusing. It leaned on the tragic and pathetic version of Plath's life. For a movie about Sylvia Plath there seemed to be a lot about her association with Hughes, little about her as an individual. The film, without prior knowledge of her life could be misleading at times. Plath was explosive (artistically, as well as emotionally) well before she ever met Hughes.
But Gwenyth Paltrow did such a great job trying to capture a complex person that seeing it once would not hurt. Just remember it is a Hollywood movie trying to titilate with a skewed story of a "mad" woman.
A disservice to Sylvia I'd have given this movie 3 stars if it weren't for the brilliant performances of its cast. Despite an unforgettable portrayal from Gwyneth Paltrow of a haunted, tormented soul in a performance that is almost disturbing, the film glossed over Sylvia Plath's relationship to her art while focusing mainly on her relationship to her husband, poet Ted Hughes.
The movie version showed collaboration between the two poets only during their courtship phase, with Sylvia losing touch with her art shortly after her marriage. However, biographies of Sylvia stress how, for several years during her marriage, and before its collapse, there had been a period of productivity and fruitful collaboration between her and her poet husband, where they both helped, encouraged and inspired one another. The relationship the-movie-Sylvia had with her poetry seemed marginal, and after her marriage, nearly non-existent.
Was it that the film-makers, with eyes on the box-office, feared to "alienate" their average customers with any emphasis on poetry, so they decided to flatten out the story, believing that focusing on her mental disturbance and putting "that bit about art" on the backburner would sell better? Or was it simply that Hollywood is completely out of its depth whenever there is any depth to be dealt with?
So, the-movie-Sylvia was this deeply disturbed woman, jealous of nearly everything her husband did, and her own relationship with poetry and her work was skimmed over and presented in a most superficial manner. Daniel Craig's performance was sophisticated, leaning more towards the portrait of an estranged husband rather than a womanizing scoundrel. Other supporting cast were excellent.
If viewers didn't know much about Sylvia Plath, the impression they would get from this movie would be that she was a mentally disturbed soul, but not a serious artist. A sad distortion, with the performance of its cast as its only saving grace.
The Hughes-Plath Marriage, In Shorthand In her effort to avoid blaming the much-maligned Ted Hughes for Sylvia Plath's 1963 suicide, the director of "Sylvia" reduces the period covering Plath's graduate studies at Cambridge University, her marriage to Hughes, the birth of their two children, and Plath's descent into morbid depression and suicide, to a series of rapid brushstrokes. These brushstrokes, unfortunately, are too shallow to convey the complexity of Plath's relationship with Hughes, let alone her relationship with the emotional demons that had haunted Plath since puberty. The problem is, this shallowness not only doesn't tell the whole truth, it alters it.
Absent from the film is Sylvia's tortured psychological relationship with the father she lost at the age of eight; her equally complex relationship with her emotionally repressed mother is barely referenced (the scene in which the beautiful Blythe Danner, as Sylvia' mother, tells Hughes that Sylvia loves him because he's the only man she's ever been afraid of, as all other men have been afraid of her, is totally out of character given even a passing knowledge of Aurelia Plath); Sylvia's unrealistic yearnings toward men and marriage as expressed through her dogged search for the perfect Uber-Mate who was part Great Hunter/part Great Poet; Hughes's complex relationship with his sister, Olwyn, with whom Plath felt intensely competitive; Hughes's propensity to occasional violence; and, lastly, Hughes's willingness to allow Plath's more overt ambition to serve his work as well, while he posed as the purer spirit who didn't care whether his work was published or not. It is a great irony that Hughes went on to become Poet Laureate of England, because Plath devoted herself as much to circulating his work as hers in the early years of their marriage, in a way that he either was not willing or organized enough to do. It is doubtful that Hughes would have gotten as well known as he did, as early as he did, without her efforts. Sylvia, in her unabashed ambition, was as quintessentially American as Hughes was quintessentially English in his public demurral of ambition. Because of her ambition, her obvious desire to marry Hughes, and the intense emotional persona that many had observed, Hughes's friends were stunned at his choice. This reviewer has always suspected that Hughes found Plath so attractive because her ambition served as a shield behind which he could hide his own.
The bottom line is that neither of these two intense, gifted, and unusual people was a bed of roses to live with. Yet we see in the film only that Sylvia is riddled with suspicion about her husband's fidelity, that she suffered from some writer's block at one point that caused her to be jealous of his steady output, and that suddenly her fears re his infidelity materialized. The film doesn't make clear which came first: her increasingly bizarre behavior, or his increasing loss of interest in the marriage and in sustaining an emotionally unstable partner. In an extraordinarily bitchy memoir, Dido Merwin, who got to know the couple when they moved permanently to England, places the blame for Hughes's defection from the marriage with Asia Wevill squarely on Plath's suspicions, which Merwin clearly felt drove Hughes to shrug his shoulders and act on those suspicions - a monstrously oversimplified view that absolves Hughes of any responsibility for how he handled the mounting tensions in his marriage.
In addition to searching for the Uber-Mate, Plath was obsessed with being one. By all accounts she was an attentive mother and an accomplished cook and housewife. When she wasn't parenting, laundering, cleaning, and cooking, Plath found time to write some more than respectable poetry, her one novel ("The Bell Jar", published first under the pen name Victoria Lucas), and keep her own work and that of her husband's (she retyped all his manuscripts) in constant circulation. And, while Hughes's adoration of their first child, Frieda, is included in the film, his peculiar resentment and emotional distance from their second child, Nick, is not.
By the time the Hughes's moved to the countryside in Devon, Plath had gone from a striking and vibrant, if troubled blonde, to a dowdy, harried mother with long brown braids, trying to keep bees, grow flowers and vegetables, run a large house with few modern conveniences, care for two small children, and, in the few hours before dawn she could call her own, write. The house was nearly impossible to heat - in winter the indoor temperature settled in the mid-40 degrees and Plath was constantly sick.
The film does not illustrate Plath's lifelong penchant for unrealistic idealizations - she plunges eagerly into the idea of English country life without weighing the intellectual consequences of isolation from the cultural stimulation of London and its literary life, or the cost to her writing in time spent running the large, old country house, its kitchen gardens, etc. - much as Plath did not stop to think about the consequences of marrying a stunningly charismatic (ask any woman who heard Hughes read in his prime), gifted, equally complex, husband with a surprisingly old-fashioned view of marriage. The realities of the move to Devon, in my opinion, dealt a crushing blow to the Hughes marriage, from which it never recovered.
Gwyneth Paltrow, bland and fashionably anorexic looking as ever, is woefully miscast as the statuesque, fiery, and deeply disturbed Sylvia. She just doesn't have the candlepower to be plausible as the woman who wrote "Ariel". Daniel Craig, a better and more charismatic actor than Paltrow, does well as far as he's allowed to as Ted Hughes, it's just that he isn't allowed to go too far. But Craig is also somewhat miscast - with all due respect, despite the dyed dark hair, Craig is fair and on the short side. Most of the time I am not wedded to exact verisimilitude in these matters. But those who have read widely about her know that the 5'9" Plath was nearly obsessed with finding a tall, rugged man as her mate, and that the very tall, dark Hughes seemed tailor-made to her eyes ("And then I saw him, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me" as she excitedly described him in her journal after seeing Hughes for the first time at that fatal party in Cambridge). To ignore these portions of Plath's psyche is to eliminate crucial pieces of the puzzle of why she chose who she did, and why things turned out the way they did. Craig is intense and intelligent, and not exactly lacking in erotic appeal, but, nevertheless, he was the wrong actor for this part. The more you know about these two writers, the less these two actors fit the bill.
There are, finally, simply too many unaccounted-for gaps in "Sylvia" between what happened and why. In order to fill in those gaps, Jeffs would have had to make a different, more complex film, one in which Plath and Hughes are each shown as much less sympathetic, but far more dimensional. All we have here is a rushed cartoon that adds up to the "Cliff Notes On The Last Years Of Sylvia Plath."
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