Customer Reviews

Sylvia

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Director Christine Jeffs manages to strike an evenhanded tone in her biopic "Sylvia," which deals with the last few years in the life of poet Sylvia Plath. Jeffs doesn't place all the blame for Ms. Plath's suffering, deep depression and subsequent suicide on Ted Hughes, (which many Plath fans do), nor does she glorify the poet's pain. However, the complexities of Plath's psyche, illness, motivations and goals, the intricacies of her relationship and marriage to Hughes, and her roles as mother and poet, are short shrifted. I don't know if this flaw is due to the limitations of the medium or to problems with the screenwriting and direction. This is a film about a woman with a suicidal past who writes poetry, loves, marries, becomes depressed, insecure and jealous, has children, is "deceived," falls deeper into depression and turns on the gas - the main character just happens to be Sylvia Plath. I really would have liked to have seen more of an emphasis given to Plath's writing and love of literature. Ms. Plath also placed tremendous importance on parenting her children and often found much pleasure in being a mother and a wife, as well as a poet. This is not evident in the movie.

Sylvia Plath's story is a desperate and tragic one. However, the movie dwells on her depression to the extent that it appears the writer never had a happy moment after her honeymoon. Even the film's use of color reflects this unhappy mood. Plath dresses in warm colors up until her wedding, after which her clothes and the ambient colors become darker and darker. Her writer's block is clearly shown but her periods of extreme productivity, especially toward the end of her life, when, writing through the nights she poured poetry onto the page with almost manic energy, are not really portrayed. All the biographies I have read on Sylvia Plath discuss the joy she found in motherhood. Her exhaustion caring for two small children, taking care of her home and writing is evident throughout the movie, as it was in real life. But nowhere is Ms. Plath shown laughing and playing with her children, with the exception of a brief Christmas scene. Her small daughter is almost always shown toddling behind her mother, a bewildered, sad expression on her face. Nor does the movie show Ms. Plath's tremendous struggle to live, fighting against her overwhelming depression. The contrasts between happiness and deep sorrow, energy and listlessness, struggle for control over her demons and loss of control are strangely absent. The character of Sylvia Plath ultimately comes across as a relatively passive figure, at the mercy of her mental illness, whose moods are closely tied to her husband's demonstrations of affection and attention.

Gwyneth Paltrow does a wonderful job, as always, given the material she had to work with. Her performance is sensitive and intense. The few times she recites poetry, including a wonderful scene where she does a small bit from Chaucer's "Wife of Bath" in Middle English, are extraordinary. Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes is excellent, capturing the magnetic charisma of the poet, his bewilderment as his relationship falls apart, and his careless indifference toward Sylvia's suffering and his children's vulnerability. Blythe Danner, Paltrow's mother in real life, is excellent in the role of Plath's mother and Michael Gambon does an extraordinary job as the sympathetic downstairs neighbor.

I have been a big fan of Sylvia Plath's poetry for many years and have read some excellent biographies on the poet as well as work by Ted Hughes. This is a difficult review for me to write because I want to be objective about the film, which does oversimplify Ms. Plath's life. We get the facts but not the depth. There is a tremendous lack of scope here. If one is not familiar with Plath and her work I am not sure that the movie would inform with more than a melodramatic overview of her life. As stated above, the acting is fine and the photography appropriately moody. For a more comprehensive experience I would suggest reading some of Ms. Plath's exceptional poetry, if you haven't already, before viewing the film.
JANA

When Frieda Hughes wrote a poem in protest of this film, she called it "Sylvia Suicide Doll." It turns out that she wasn't that far off. This is a mediocre movie in many respects, and a decent one in others. Overall, it is a misfire.

Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) was an American poet who found her soul mate in British poet Ted Hughes, played here by Daniel Craig. Sylvia was obsessed with her poetry, and was a little resentful when her husband's star eclipsed hers. Their passionate marriage deteriorates when Hughes cheats on Sylvia and she discovers it, moving with her two children to London. Worn down by depression, Sylvia Plath killed herself in 1963, at the age of thirty, but not before writing the brilliant "Ariel" poems, which secured her place in the canon of American poets.

Gwyneth Paltrow's performance as Sylvia Plath is the reason to see this movie. She is especially effective in the second part of the film, when Sylvia separates from Ted Hughes and plunges into a deep depression. In these scenes Paltrow looks and acts so much like the real Plath that you get goose bumps. The resemblence is eerie. Paltrow creates a woman desperate for love and recognition, but who dealt with intense suicidal urges all her life. Many people have decided to cast Sylvia Plath as a saint, with Hughes as the devil who drove her to suicide. Paltrow makes it clear that Sylvia's death wish was there from the beginning, and dares to make Plath unlikeable at times. You can understand why Ted Hughes left her, but also sympathize with her as she falls apart. The scene where Sylvia burns the letters that Ted's mistress wrote him makes your heart break. Gwyneth Paltrow gives a very strong, brave performance. It's a tragedy that nearly everything surrounding it is inferior.

The supporting cast, with the exception of Michael Gambon and Blythe Danner, is forgettable. Daniel Craig is hopeless as Ted Hughes, he is simply not a very good actor. The first choices for the part of Ted were Russell Crowe and Colin Firth, who both refused, no doubt because the script for "Sylvia" is weak. It fails to give you a sense of who Plath was as a writer, and is full of holes. In one scene, Sylvia says that she can't write anymore. In the very next, she is celebrating the publication of "The Colossus," her first book. The cinematography for this movie is breathtakingly beautiful, one of the best of the year.

The one thing that I cannot forgive this movie for is its ending. It perpetuates the myth that Sylvia Plath is a martyr to suicide, that it is somehow noble that she abandones her two young children and her career. In the film, as Sylvia looks into the oven, a heavenly golden light shines upon her. There is no excuse for this ending. Sylvia Plath's suicide was a tragic loss to her family and to literature, not a noble act.

See this movie for the cinematography and for Gwyneth Paltrow's great performance. One day there will be a great movie made about the life of Sylvia Plath. This one manages to be little more than the CliffsNotes version.

I find it difficult to relate to Gwyneth Paltrow as an actress, although I've appreciated quite a few of the movies she has acted in. This time however, I marvelled at her, really marvelled.

Unfortunately I think that in order to show more complex real-life characters, film makers *must* frame them in the context of their romantic relationships primarily. A film just draws more attention that way.

That is where where I was left wanting in this...that I didn't believe that it was jealousy that unravelled her, or that had he "made her happy" she would not have killed herself. The illness was there, and the death of her father brought it to the surface for the first time. It was a disease.

The fascinating thing about the disease of mental illness, is that the same thing that disconnects a person from the world around them, seems to be the thing that enables them to be extra sensitive to other sensations, and maybe to their own inner workings as well. My favorite line of the movie is when she says that the truth loves her. She sees more.

I think that we're learning more and more that it is a myth to think that a person cannot be creative or tap into genius without continually slipping into insanity, or risking it. I'd like to see more exploration of the topic in film though.

Sylvia Plath is one of the great female poets of all time, in league with Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and the underrated Louise Gluck. "Ariel" may be the finest book of poems by a woman EVER, vivid, dark, trilling, grisly, and gorgeous. That book, her last, is available in a lovely new hardbound with previous drafts and interesting information.

Get that, rather than this film, because the filmmakers were barred from quoting very much of her poetry or excerpting lines from her best novel "The Bell Jar," and without her powers of the written word on display, we don't know why a movie about Sylvia Plath would even be made.

All we have is a dysfunctional woman succumbing to suicidal depression. Poets' lives are seldom impressive; it's their work we remember! See "As Night Falls" for a much better example of a poet bio-pic; it has a far more interesting plot and is soaked in the man's vibrant poetry.

I have been waiting to see this movie since I first heard it was in production. As someone who writes herself, I have long admired the mesmerizing, exposed, raw depth that is Sylvia's talent. Sylvia's poems (and life), move the on looker deep inside of her core in such a way that no other can do. This was not captured in the movie. This movie was a surface display that skims the honesty and history of Sylvia. It's as if the director was provided a "summary" of Sylvia's life (and only part of her life, her life with Ted) and stretched that summary out for an hour and fifty minutes. The movie was slow and this could have been avoided if more of her life was explored. To see the essence of Sylvia, you need to see her earlier years (her childhood, her father and mother, her hospital stay, her internship, The Bell Jar) and delve inside of her mind and her need to purge through her writings. There was also an evolution in the development of Sylvia's poems, in her real life, that the movie completely by passed. Her poems initially were written with the aide of a thesaurus and tended to be classic and calculated, while the final poems, written before her death came pouring out in shorter, smashing truth. Her best poems written at her deepest point. There is a creative story to be told her then, as well. Her poems growth, tell multiple stories in themselves. I learned nothing new, and in fact mostly noticed what was missing. The movie was emotional, but too direct as to why (there was more to the why). Any movie that has such an ending, would touch the viewer. However, it was actually my prior knowledge of Sylvias demise that moved me through the movie, not the movie itself. Those who view this movie without that prior knowledge are not experiencing her story in the fullness. I hope one day a movie is made about Sylvia the at least _tries_ to capture the many faceted dimensions of her whole life and the haunting vulnerability of her work.

I agree with all the negative reviews, and think that Paltrow gave a good performance, and I would tell anyone interested in SP to see the film (Don't know if you cd stop them) but I'd say that overall the movie is too long and melodramatic, boring at times, and has no depth. I found myself checking my watch only 30 minutes into it. The other bad thing about this is that the DVD itself sucks. With no extra features, I don't see the point. They could have at least had some commentary or making of stuff, or even a Plath doc on it- but there is nothing at all. I hated "The Hours"- I thought that was even worse than this, but at least the DVD is better and has more features on Woolf and the writer, etc. I ended up getting "The Hours" on DVD even though I hated the film because of the features (I only paid like 6 dollars of course). But overall, bad movie, poorly written, but well acted, nice cinematography and no features on the DVD. What a bunch of lazy bums.

Being a fan of both literature and of film, I expected great things from this film, but what I got was a so-so tale of truly one of the most disturbed poets in American literature. I was very surprised to find that Paltrow's portrayal of Sylvia Plath was, for the most part, somewhat one-dimensional. One does not really see the depth of emotion in Paltrow's performance that one would get from reading Plath's poetry. The show really belongs to Daniel Craig, who, in most of his movies, achieves a sense of being the "mystery man." His Ted Hughes is fantastic, but the film tries to work around taking sides here. Many have blamed Hughes for Plath's eventual suicide, but the film tries to remain neutral, only making things a bit confusing. Are we supposed to like Hughes? Are we supposed to believe that he was the cause of her death? Remember, too, that Plath had already tried to commit suicide twice before. This seems to be one of the faults in John Brownlow's writing. Everyone but the actors seem new to film; Christine Jeffs has only directed one other film, and Brownlow has written for television, but not for film. One of the other faults to this film is bringing in actors like Blythe Danner and Michael Gambon and not giving them a worthwhile part. Danner does work hard at her small role as Plath's mother, as does Gambon as the downstairs neighbor, but anyone could really have done these jobs. When I see extremely talented actors like Gambon and Danner, I expect to see greatness, not small bit parts. Other than these problems, the story was decent, and Craig's acting carried the movie. I wish Focus Features could have delivered something a bit better, but all I have seen is a decent, so-so adaptation of the life of Sylvia Plath.

I was just about equally looking forward to and dreading the release of "Sylvia". Finally catching up with it on DVD, I give it high technical kudos(photographed extremely well, sound is superb). As far as biography goes, however...
I should say that I have been interested in Sylvia Plath since college. While not the stereotypical angst-ridden college girl, my Plath-loving roommate was...But her interest finally inspired me to read the famous poems that this most famous suicide wrote. Surprise! They were *great*. Plath's poems deserved all the notoriety they'd gotten. And yes, when a body of work that's so famously dark(mostly)is the product of a woman who very famously killed herself, you DO want to learn more about the personal life of the poet. And once you begin to delve into one or two Plath biographies-oh, my. What a fascinating, infuriating, brilliant, troubled woman she was. Truly, this was a life story that begs for a decent film treatment. Sadly, after an opening credit sequence that perfectly captures the strange, haunting effect of Plath's poetry, the "story" of the film-that is, the screenplay-is pretty darn lame: a by-the-numbers romance of a troubled girl and her troubling husband. And crimes of crimes-it's done *boringly*. So much is glossed over-or wildly over-emphasized. Real-life, documented events that were exciting are for some strange reason restaged to make them less so. And there's zero chemistry between the "passionate" couple. Daniel Craig is totally miscast as the man so handsomely LARGE that Plath's friend Anne Sexton called him "Ted Huge": he looks puny and unattractive. Paltrow is trying much, much too hard to "be" Sylvia Plath; she should have just relaxed a bit(no matter how uptight the real woman was), been less "careful" with her every gesture. Better yet-they should have cast someone who looked less "like" Sylvia and embodied her better-Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Cate Blanchett, any number of great actresses could have helped. But the fatal flaw is the lousy screenplay. In sum: Plath afficionados will be disappointed; others will be totally bored.

Although I thought Paltrow did a good job as Plath, I still felt this movie could have been so much more.
After all, Plath was so much more.
I did like the way Hughes was portrayed though...not just as the man who did Sylvia wrong, but as one who contributed, along with other circumstances, to her depression.
As one who knows a tremendous amount about Plath, I was expecting pure poetry, but instead I got, a pathetic woman crying, screaming and dying throughout the movie.
Plath was so much more, her poetry was so much more.
She deserved something exquisite...
Because she was exquisite.
And fun...when the devil was not crouching behind her ear, when she was not freezing her ass off in Great Britain, when she was writing in her journal.
Anyone would hate her after seeing this movie...
My suggestion---buy her journals. Completely superb!

Not a bad movie, though, like Plath's life as well, it is very depressing, however it is good that such a movie was made, despite protests from Frieda Hughes and the overall opinions of critics. Personally, I feel that Paltrow, who had fought to get the movie made, had made a good decision in taking on such a project, and, although some may argue otherwise, she did accurately portray Plath. (If you do not believe me then I strongly suggest you pick up her UNABRIDGED journals)

However, I was disappointed that this movie was more concerned with her relationship with Hughes than her entire life. Possibly it would be better if a screen adaptation of The Bell Jar was made, since it is not only a great piece of literature, but was also widely received in America during it's publication and, if anything (not to sound redundant), but America is probably fairly more willing to view psychotic breaks and suicide today and would be well received by many. (In case any producers are currently reading in, which I doubt....)