Sylvia

Rating

Director

Christine Jeffs

Screenplay

John Brownlow

Length

116 min.

Starring

Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner, Michael Gambon, Amira Casar, Andrew Havill

MPAA Rating

R (For sexuality/nudity and language)

Review

The real life story of a troubled poet acts as the background for the Focus Features release Sylvia.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays the eponymous Sylvia Plath, a real-life, renowned American poet whose tumultuous childhood and marriage to celebrated poet Edward "Ted" Hughes (Daniel Craig) act as depressing fodder for her own work. The film opens with Plath’s simple words about dying well and subsequently flashes back to the beginning of a long and depressing trek to her own death. Her first published poem is about to be reviewed and she discovers that the critic didn’t like it. Hughes read the poem and critiqued it poorly and she seeks him out at a ball where they suddenly fall in love and eventually decide to get married.

After the marriage, Sylvia begins falling deeper into depression where she believes her husband is cheating on her. She slowly collapses as the film progresses with a number of narrow attempts at suicide thwarted by her love for her children. At first, we’re merely bemused at the way she overreacts to simple occurrences but eventually discover that her outbursts are little more than grabs at attention that she never attains.

Paltrow, not the greatest among actresses, is the only thing propping up this dreadfully dull film. The audience is supposed to accept the couple’s romance despite only about ten minutes of character development. The escapade Hughes and Plath take part in is superficial and confusing. Screenwriter John Brownlow and director Christine Jeffs don’t seem to understand the necessities of cinematic gestalt. To fathom the relationship that develops between the characters, we need more build up and maturation. It’s not enough that Paltrow conveys Plath’s gradual mental collapse and her rabid jealousy, the rest of the cast is needed to provide that extra impetus and there simply isn’t enough to suffice.

Sylvia is a film that is composed of formulaic scenes torn from a sundry of better films about psychological disintegration. Here, we’re forced to follow along as a beautiful woman tries to avoid succumbing to her wretched emotions. Meanwhile, the period sets and costumes provide the illusion of a well-produced film while the plot meanders slowly to a hackneyed conclusion. Craig gives only a slightly better than average performance. His character is not sympathetic and we never care whether Sylvia stays with him or leaves. Jarred Harris as Ted and Sylvia’s friend and publisher Al Alvarez attempts to give us an on-lookers perspective of the crumbling relationship but never elevates beyond a plot device.

Paltrow’s real-life mother Blythe Danner also makes an appearance as Plath’s onscreen mother. Danner appears in the film all too briefly, being the finest performer in the cast, thereby being forced to deliver an uninteresting and unneeded diversion. The most surprising performance comes from a man who only appears in three useless scenes. Michael Gambon plays a character referenced in the credits as Professor Thomas but who the audience merely recognizes as the kindly old man living downstairs. He’s just what the doctor ordered to heal the ailing film but even physicians can only do so much when a patient is beyond the miracles of medicine.

Sylvia tries to be a deeply sentimental film while forcing the audience to rationalize what it sees. The creators expect us to fall in love with this woman and empathize with the deep emotional pain she feels. They want us to see a deeper irony in this woman’s life as she writes such beautiful, if not morbid, poetry only to have a life filled with ugliness and misery. Too deep for some and too shallow for others, Sylvia is a mélange of styles and themes that searches for an answer that it never finds.

Review Written

December 10, 2003