Review: Sylvia (2003)
Harvey S. Karten
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: B
Focus Features
Directed by: Christine Jeffs
Written by: John Brownlow
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Blythe Danner, Jared
Harris, Michael Gambon
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 10/9/03
Some say that poetry emerges from unrequited love; that
satisfied people lack the motivation to pour out their emotions in
verse. Freud trumps even that theory, stating that all creativity
emerges from a sexual repression. Sylvia Plath's life is
testimonial to both concepts. After having her poems rejected
forty-five times, she turns on the full power of her creativity just
after her humiliating separation from her husband, Ted.
Ironically, the marriage could have been held together had her
own work been at least the equal of her husband's; yet she
knocked out powerful verses that won her the Pulitzer Prize
when she was most miserable, another irony being that the
coveted awards and recognition were hers only posthumously.
In a sincere, serious study of her brief life, Christine Jeffs,
utilizing John Brownlow's pungent script, finds some humor in
this film, a biopic that focuses not on her entire life but on the
love between her and Ted Hughes. Given the lack of interest in
poetry in our own country, should you mention her name here in
reasonably educated circles, the first thought that comes to
mind is not her verses in the powerful book of poems "Ariel," not
her novel, "The Bell Jar," which was made into a movie by Larry
Peerce twenty-four years ago (about the crackup of an
overachiever), but the fact that she committed suicide at the age
of thirty, a smart, beautiful woman at the height of her creative
power.
Boasting a performance by Gwyneth Paltrow as the titled
Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as her lover and husband Ted
Hughes, "Sylvia" is a reasonably compelling story linked to
sonorous but intrusive music, but serves even more as a cynical
sociology professor's lesson on how marriage can cripple love.
The rapport between Sylvia and Ted at their initial meeting as
students in England's Cambridge College is electric. The
couple kiss passionately on the dance floor just an hour or so
after they meet. But Ted's charisma and success as a poet
attract a number of young women, his meeting in a courtyard
with one of them convincing his beautiful wife that she has
married a wanderer. When Ted is flat-out caught having an
affair with best friend Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), his straying,
adding an imposing psychological burden on the yet
unsuccessful Sylvia, proves devastating. Their move to Devon
and London from Massachusetts, where Sylvia's mother Aurelia
Plath (Blythe Danner) commands her new son-in-law to be good
to the fragile Sylvia, had proven disastrous. Though the couple
produced two children, Ted's inability to keep his pants zipped
leads to a break-up and, in the midst of one of the coldest,
dreariest Londons in memory, she ends her life by gas.
Some of the film has the look of a Masterpiece Theatre
production not a compliment and needs more uplift such as
that provided by the witty and caring Professor Thomas (Michael
Gambon), Sylvia's neighbor, and could use more opening up by
developing the poet's hint to critic Al Alvarez (Jared Harris) that
she would like to take up with a lover. The audience will leave
the film with new insight into Plath's tormented state, perhaps
discussing whether her suicide is more a result of a chemical
depression (she attempted to take her life with pills years
before), or of her frightening aloneness after separating from
Ted. In either case, we are reinforced in what we already know:
that good looks, smarts, and children are no barrier to
depression.
Rated R. 110 minutes.(c) 2003 by Harvey Karten at
Harvey...@cs.com
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Steve Rhodes
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2003 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): *** 1/2
"What do you do when your life goes as bad as it can and keeps getting worse?"
poet Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) asks Al Alvarez (Jared Harris), a literary
critic who was the first to recognize her genius when everyone else only
noticed Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), her husband and fellow poet. Al offers
useless advice about plowing on in life. Falling rapidly into depression's
black hole, Sylvia needs something more than platitudes. Her husband loves her
desperately, but she's toxic to him. Obsessively jealous, her actions cause
what she fears.
"Dying is an art, and I do it exceptionally well," Sylvia brags honestly and
sadly in the film's opening line. Paltrow's heartfelt, Oscar-caliber
performance is stunning in this romantic tragedy.
The superlative SYLVIA is the second film from director Christine Jeffs, whose
last picture was the mesmerizing RAIN. Again Jeffs is masterful at setting a
strong and evocative mood. This period piece takes place mainly in the early
1960s after Ted and Sylvia have married. (We first meet them as young lovers
in their early days at Cambridge when the mean distance between their lips
stays at about three inches.) The cinematography and set decoration captures
the era without ever being showy. And, when Sylvia's life begins to fade, cold
and dreary snow covers the landscape in the perfect metaphor for her life's
troubles. The music, by Oscar winner Gabriel Yared (THE ENGLISH PATIENT), is
so dramatic and powerful that the film sometimes becomes more like a great
concert with visual scoring rather than the other way around.
Sylvia's early reviews, when she can get anybody to pay attention, aren't
encouraging. One critic calls her work, "bourgeois and nakedly ambitious." So
bright that she went to England on a Fulbright scholarship, she says that her
troubles actually started at age 9 when her father died, and since then she has
attempted suicide several times. When she tries to transition from student
poet into a working wife, she becomes incredibly unhappy. She is a prolific
cook and a fertile wife -- neither of which give her any satisfaction -- but
she suffers chronic writer's block.
In the film's most ironic line, Sylvia complains, "Why do you humiliate me so?"
to her husband who has done nothing more than speak to the female half of the
couple whom they have asked over for dinner. Sylvia makes such an ass of
herself that everyone else at the table wants nothing more than to stare at the
floor.
You'll be staring too -- staring at a wonderfully gripping film that earns the
strong emotions that it produces in you without ever being manipulative.
SYLVIA runs 1:43. It is rated R for "sexuality/nudity and language" and would
be acceptable for teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, October 24, 2003. In
the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve....@InternetReviews.com
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