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SYLVIA
Released in 2003 under the genre Biography/Drama,'Sylvia' chronicles the turbulent life of Poet Sylvia Plath, and her seven year marriage to her husband Ted Hughes Starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig.
The year is 1956 and the film opens with Sylvia talking about a dream she had. In the dream she had likened herself to a tree with branches outstretched. Each branch representing something about herself. One branch was her life, one branch, her husband, her children, and one branch, her glittering academic career. The leaves were her poems. As the dream closed the leaves had turned to brown and fluttered to the ground, and drifted away. This visceral dream seems to encapsulate Sylvia's state of mind in all it's complexities. -
Such was Sylvia's ( Gwyneth Paltrow) melancholic personality. She viewed life with a mournful eye. Her father had died when she was 9 and his death had a profound effect upon her. Anyone who has read her brilliant poem 'Daddy', will realise the strange and twisted feelings that Sylvia bore for her father. She likened him to a German Nazi, and the relationship with her father had a huge bearing on her life. Sylvia is American and had started to write poetry seriously, though it is not honed in any particular style as yet. We see her at Cambridge University, enjoying campus life and all it has to offer. She appears to be reasonably happy at this point of her life, and she tries to get her poetry published by small local magazines. In one of the magazines her work is slated. They call her poetry bourgeois and commercial. As she reads the magazine she spots a poem by a man called Ted Hughes entitled 'Fallgriefs girlfriend', and she is very taken with the words and the
style of his poetry.
At a jazz evening in town she meets Ted (Daniel Craig) and it is an instant chemistry, a meeting of poetic minds, and they fall in love, and so begins the turbulent seven year relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Ted sees a scar on Sylvia's face and he asks her where she got it from. She tells him that she had taken sleeping pills three years previously, and she crawled into a hole in the cellar of her family home, and waited to die. Such is her delicate state of being. Sylvia is a complex, fragile, and suicidal character, life and death occupying most of her thoughts. Her poetry is dark, and difficult to analyse. This film is not so much the story of the life of Sylvia Plath, but more a tale of the notorious marriage between the two poets. This was her driving force and her ultimate destruction. Henceforth the film shows the effects that her marriage, Ted's rising career, her children, and mundane domesticity have on her as a person and a poet. Set in the1950's when women were struggling to be taken seriously and to get their voices heard. -
The immediate thing that strikes me about this film is it's breathtaking cinematography, with beautiful shots of the Cambridge scenery, and University, punts along the river Cam, and stunning use of the close up. The striking colouring used within the film with it's use of subdued palettes of greens reds, browns, and blues, bring a true beauty to the proceedings. Everything visual about this film is shot with beauty, and this is what held my attention for the 149 minutes. The film runs at a snails pace, but at no time was I bored, or my mind wandering. I was just caught up in the story about what drove Sylvia to her ultimate suicide attempt. This isn't a spoiler, as historically this is a well known fact. If this film is correct in it's portrayal of the events between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, it seems apparent to me, that his treatment of the emotionally fragile state of Sylvia did nothing to enhance her confidence in personality, with his many torrid affairs, going on under her very nose. Sylvia's initial irrational jealousy and vivid imagination may have driven Ted into infidelity, or maybe it would have happened anyway.
Ted Hughes was an attractive charismatic straight talking man, and this drew women to him like moths to a flame, and with his career as a poet more prominently respected and recognised by society of the day, Sylvia must have felt like a lesser poet than to that of her counterpart. Ted Hughes was portrayed extremely well by Daniel Craig and I could totally empathise with the mental devastation that Sylvia must have gone through, stuck at home with two small children, suffering with writers block, being uninspired by her domestic confinement, whilst her husband was out bedding woman left right and centre, and all the time Sylvia's mental state becoming more and more unstable, and erratic. Both characters were flawed and complex, but I took from the portrayal of Hughes that his actions were the destroying force at work and not Plath's depression. Beautifully directed by Christine Jeffs, the direction showed sympathetically but without over sentimentality the decline of a woman hell bent on self destruction throughout her life. I liked the use of symphony music within the film and it seemed totally in keeping with the central theme of poetic work. It is due to the publishing of 'Birthday Letters' by Ted Hughes some thirty years after Sylvia's death, which details the turbulent relationship between Sylvia and Ted, and without this, this film may never have been made.
The films portrayal of events have been disowned by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, calling it a monstrosity against her mothers name. But it answers a lot of questions for me if historically correct. I didn't like the poetry of Sylvia Plath at all, until I took an English Literature course and her work was a module. I was completely taken with her poem 'Cinderella', and thus began my fascination with this poet. I liked the film a lot, it went extremely quickly, but there again I was very interested in it's subject matter. It wasn't a huge box office draw, but Gwyneth Paltrow did receive an award for her portrayal of Sylvia Plath. Personally I would like to have seen Nicole Kidman in this role, after she gave such an amazing performance as Virginia Woolf in 'The Hours'. My one major disappointment with this film is that it didn't delve deep enough into the workings of the mind of one of the 20th century's major poetical literary influences. It barely touched on her poetry, and also the mythological fascination she holds as a woman, with scholars today.
It isn't just about her poetry, it's also her tortured soul, mind and being. Her fascination lies in the 'Whole package' of Sylvia Plath. This aspect should have been explored more, and more emphasis put upon this. What we got from this film, I felt, was a watered down version of the true woman. She had so many layers, so many dark corners, that I felt were not explored. Sylvia Plath was a complex, emotionally crippled, deeply haunted personality, and I would like to have seen this portrayed in a more in depth study of her character. She said of herself "I feel hollow. There is nothing behind the eyes". - I felt the force of the film was not what it should have been taken this should have been such an interesting character study. What 'Sylvia' the film actually was, was more a tale of 'the marriage'. I feel it might have fared better, and been more powerful a film, if it had focused more on Sylvia Plath, the woman, and Poet. Ironically, as with most poets, her true fame and iconic status was afforded her after her death. -
Running Time: 149 minutes BBFC Rating: 15 years and over
Directed by Christine Jeffs Produced by Alison Owen Mary Richards Written by John Brownlow
Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris
Thank you for reading Electra 2008*
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Sylvia is based on the emotional true story of the passionate yet turbulent relationship ... more
between two of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath (Paltrow) and Ted Hughes (Craig) shared an unbreakable bond of love which is beautifully p...
Mar 4th, 2008
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