When the title character in the new film Sylvia finally commits suicide, it is a release, not only for her, but for the audience as well, who have had to endure the banalities of domestic life alongside the poetess.
The film recounts the tragic life of poet and author Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her tumultuous love affair and marriage with fellow poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig). Unfortunately, instead of living up to the tragic tale that was Plath’s life, Sylvia is an unconvincing portrait of the writer. When we first see Sylvia as she rides her bike to Cambridge, we expect that we’ll get to know her a little bit before she’s forced into a new situation. But this is not what the filmmakers have in mind, and within the span of fifteen minutes, she not only meets the man of her dreams, but marries him as well.
Immediately thrust into the sphere of not-so domestic bliss, Sylvia doesn’t really get a chance to flesh out its main character before hurtling her through the rocky relationship, and thus the movie spends most of its time dealing with her problematic marriage rather than the artistic inclinations of one of the most famous poets of the 20th century. While the plot is drawn strictly form the events of Plath’s life, it might have been better if the film didn’t pursue such a literal reading, as the account becomes boring quite early on. While the film does get somewhat better once Hughes is out of the scene, this material comes far too late (an hour and a half too late) for it to repair the damage already done.
There isn’t much to note about the acting. Gwenyth Paltrow is a much better actress than the shallow script allows her to be. When Sylvia does speak the about the darker impulses of her soul, Paltrow simply stares off into space and moody music swells to conveys her state of mind (it would also be an interesting exercise to record the total time that the actress has to spend on screen crying and ripping up papers). For a movie about the relationship of two prominent poets, the dialogue in no way reflects the characters’ intelligence, aside from the recitation of Shakespeare and Chaucer at the beginning of their courtship. Instead, their exchanges consist mainly of three- and four-word sentences (e.g. “You fucked her!” “Yes, I fucked her!”).
When I was in high school, Sylvia Plath was a favorite of many girls because her poetry reflected the darker features of the teenage soul. This film feels like it was written by one of those girls, who never grew up to appreciate the nuances and real suffering in Plath’s work, but instead reduced her problems to her difficulties as a housewife and mother. While these factors may have contributed to the overall depth of the author’s work, I’m inclined to believe that there must be something beyond the surface that makes her poems resonate, and this is specifically what is lacking the in film. While the filmmakers were not permitted to use Plath’s poetry in the film (her daughter, the executor of her estate, did not favour the project), they could have conveyed the power of her work in so many other ways.
Instead of offering a compelling portrait of an artist on par with something like The Hours, Iris, or Pollock, Sylvia tortures the audience with insignificant details, and makes her life’s work incidental to the plot, thus contributing to (rather than finding a way out of) the clichés and accusations that surround the poet’s life story.
