gwyneth paltrow, daniel craig
lucy davenport, michael gambon
jared harris
unfashionable observations rating: C
Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) first meets Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) at a party celebrating the publication of a poetry digest. In that publication, Sylvia’s poem is callously criticized by Hughes himself. Upon accosting him for the first time on account of the critique, however, Sylvia is not so much angry or upset by the bad review of her work, but rather intrigued by the author of the critique. Hughes’ own poem appears in the digest, and Sylvia becomes enamored by it, as she finds that it touches her in a way that a Shakespearean sonnet only could. When she makes herself known to Hughes as the target of his critique, he is at once comically apologetic on the one hand, and taken by Sylvia’s beauty and boldness on the other. So begins their most tumultuous, fateful relationship.
The rest of the movie traces the ups and downs—mostly the downs—of their marriage. A lot of the film focuses on the jealous nature of Sylvia herself. She was never quite confident in Ted’s love for her, although she herself could not imagine loving anyone else but Ted. At one point, she describes themselves as two halves, “walking around with big gaping holes shaped like the other person.” Sylvia’s passion for Ted is remarkably intense, and her jealousy almost becomes a natural extension of that love.
They eventually separate from each other when Sylvia discovers that Ted has taken on another lover. Utterly crestfallen, Sylvia’s paranoia and depression spiral out of control, ultimately ending in a curious revelation wherein beauty and salvation from her life of unrequited love lie in suicide.
This is a sad movie that never quite achieves an intimacy with the audience that would really allow us to experience that sadness along with the characters. We are numbed, rather than heartbroken. Certainly, this is not the fault of the story itself, for it is indeed a heartbreaking one. Rather, the film makes the mistake of focusing too much on the story—on the events, on the ups and downs—and not enough on the people who lived through the story. The effect of this is that we never really see anything resembling character development: Sylvia and Ted are almost exactly the same characters by the end of the movie as they were at the beginning. They don’t change—only their circumstances do. And that’s problematic, for we fail to relate to them as real human beings. Throughout the entire movie, we feel them to be mere caricatures, and not real people.
One cannot help but think of Stephen Daldry’s The Hours when watching this movie. Both movies trace the lives of melancholic literary geniuses who kill themselves in the end. However, the similarities stop there. Daldry’s film was brilliant in its style alone, as it cleverly balanced the lives of three women living similar lives in different time periods. Sylvia, on the other hand, is pretty much a straightforward story of one woman’s struggle for love and self-expression. The stinging irony, of course, is that even though Sylvia focuses on the life of just one woman, we are never able to relate to Paltrow’s character in the way we related to the three characters in The Hours. Because the subtle intimacy of The Hours is lacking in Sylvia, we leave the movie knowing a lot about what happened to Sylvia Plath, but little about who she really was.
I’d give Christine Jeffs’ Sylvia a C.
