Sylvia (2003)

Just perfect...

Crappy film

An absolute waste of money

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It's 1956 Cambridge, England. American student Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) is dismissed by the high-minded poetry review. She is taken with fellow student Edward Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig)'s poems. They eventually get married. He has many female fans and she suspects his infidelity. They have two children. She struggles to write under successful Ted's overwhelming shadow. She falls into depression and eventually commits suicide in 1963.It's a downbeat biopic that bothers on old-fashion melodrama. Paltrow is lovely but I figured Plath would be more fragile even before her breakdown. Daniel Craig has the prerequisite charisma. The movie is very flat. It is unable to elevate the material into something more dramatic. This is a long drawn out character study that isn't terribly interesting.

I've wanted to see this movie for quite some time, so you can imagine my disappointment when I found a shallow and almost un-sympathetic retelling of the great Sylvia Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes.The story at first felt very rushed and then just seemed to drag on. Pacing was a big problem here because as a viewer you kind of fall in and out of the story. One minute it catches your interest but then it loses it through lack of elaboration or because it just wasn't what you expected. Daniel Craig wasn't at all believable as the brooding poet who somehow won the love (rather quickly) of the famous Ms. Sylvia Plath. He seemed so out of place, and maybe I'm too young but I just kept saying to myself "Why does James Bond give a hoot about Poetry?" Gwyeneth Paltrow did a good job, she was very present in all of her scenes, but again I think the casting choice was odd. All I could see with her was Viola from Shakespeare In Love, (but I guess that would explain her love of poetry.)A movie about Sylvia Plath's life might prove more interesting; a movie about her entire life that is. She seemed to be a fairly interesting person, with all of the suicide attempts and whatnot. Perhaps it was just the fact that it only focused on her failed marriage to a very depressing man which made the movie, dare I say it, boring? I don't hate it, although I think there's a lot to dislike, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone I know. Maybe you have to truly be a poet to enjoy this movie, since there seem to be a great deal of Motif's and symbolism in it.

There is a certain type of undergraduate who sees Sylvia Plath as the victim-heroine of a period that lionized talented men but had no place for women of similar gifts, and fortunately this film does not pander to them. Poets rarely receive lavish acclaim or wealth during their lifetimes, and hers was at least equal to her talent and irrespective of her gender. Any reasonably critical reader of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar can see evidence of serious mental illness, which in Plath's case went largely untreated, and this film chooses to focus more on that aspect of her life than on anti-feminist conspiracy theories. However, the film comes up short of fully showing Plath as the highly complex and contradictory person her contemporaries knew: sexy, seductive yet so harsh and venal in her judgments of men (especially her husband and her father) as to seem man-hating; also manipulative and vain and yet so insecure that she went long periods without writing. She was likely bi-polar and could on occasion be described as downright monstrous, yet the film hollywoodizes Plath into a more conventional 'troubled' melodrama heroine, rather than delving deeper into the brutal reality of the day-to-day life of someone with significant mental illness. This is surprising given that director Christine Jeffs' earlier film on mental illness, Rain, was unstintingly honest. Plath's well known life history is covered in straightforward biopic narrative: her close-distant, love-hate yo-yo relationship with her mother; her famous first suicide attempt and the subsequent year spent in a sanatorium that was the basis for The Bell Jar; her rocky marriage to British poet Ted Hughes that ended because of his infidelity; her prolific period as a celebrated poet and her eventual death by suicide while still young.I should point out that I thought the cinematography and production design were wonderful. The excellent period look is established by bleeding out bright color from every scene while giving it an amber tint like old photographs. The sets were almost hyper-realistic - cluttered, dim and claustrophobic with none of the romanticized shininess that Hollywood often lavishes on period dramas.

This could have been a made for television movie, but it's a BBC movie, so you know it's going to be better anyway. Gwyneth shines, as does her mum, and everybody is very very good. There's just one issue.Daniel Craig. The next James Bond. You can't understand a word he says. He mumbles. Incoherently. He hasn't any diction at all. You'd almost want to ring him and suggest he take the Demosthenes cure.His diction is so bad that only a single line in the movie comes across as distinct - and even that takes an effort on the part of the viewer. Something remotely reminiscent of the following.'I've been told you're taking pills.'And before and after that you'd swear there was mud in the sound system when he speaks.There's one scene in the movie where Paltrow and then Craig recite poems of their own at breakneck speed. Paltrow is intelligible even if she's hurtling through it so fast you can't really comprehend, but Craig is just a succession of pseudo-vocal grunts and other assorted sounds.Think back to that very first Bond scene where 007 was first introduced. The casino. In London. Where Bond is fleecing Sylvia Trench at the chemin de fer table. And shiver at the prospect that it's not Connery but Craig who delivers the famous line.'I admire your courage, Miss...?''Trench. Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, Mr...?''Mumble. Mumble mumble.''WHO??!??'It's a sad story, and Paltrow doesn't portray her character as morbid and unsympathetic as some wannabe critics would have it, and the dynamic of the relationship between Plath and Hughes comes through with brilliant colouring, but it's a biopic. Some will love it, others hate it - and most will speculate how much more they could have enjoyed it had they understood anything Craig said.All of which is not to say Plath's poetry or poetry in general merits special recognition. The poetry of both Hughes and Plath comes across today as specious and pretentious. But all that can be overlooked with a thespian performance of the class of Gwyneth.