Taglines: Life was too small to contain her.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932, Sylvia Plath developed a precocious talent as a writer, publishing her first poem when she was only eight years old. That same year, tragedy introduced itself into her life as Plath was forced to confront the unexpected death of her father. In 1950, she began studying at Smith College on a literary scholarship, and while she was an outstanding student, she also began suffering from bouts of extreme depression.
Following her junior year, she attempted suicide for the first time. Plath survived, and, in 1955, she was granted a Fulbright Scholarship to study in England at the University of Cambridge. While in Great Britain, Plath met Ted Hughes, a respected author, who would later become the British Poet Laureate. The two fell in love and married in 1956.
Marriage, family, and a growing reputation as an important poet nonetheless failed to bring Plath happiness. She became increasingly fascinated with death, a highly visible theme in her later poetry and her sole novel, The Bell Jar (1963). After Hughes left her for another woman, Plath’s depression went into a tailspin from which she never recovered. She killed herself at age 30.
Sylvia is a British biographical drama film directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, and Michael Gambon. It tells the true story of the romance between prominent poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The film begins with their meeting at Cambridge in 1956 and ends with Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1963.
Filming took place between October 2002 and February 2003. Much of the film was shot in and around the New Zealand city of Dunedin, with the University of Otago serving to represent Cambridge.
”Dying is an art.” These words, from Sylvia Plath’s poem ”Lady Lazarus,” are the first spoken in ”Sylvia,” Christine Jeffs’s emotionally rich life of the poet, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow. The assertion may be debatable, but there is no question that Plath’s own death — she committed suicide in 1963, at 30 — has been subject to unending analysis and interpretation, framed by the kind of inquiry that usually guides classroom literary analysis. (The literary critic A. Alvarez, who was Plath’s close friend and who is portrayed in the movie by Jared Harris, likened her death to a final unwritten poem.) What was Plath’s intention? What did her suicide mean? What did it reveal about her family, her society, her time, her sex, herself?
The answers to these questions, chewed over by biographers, novelists, polemicists and fellow poets, have been contentious, and nothing in Plath’s biography has proved more polarizing than her marriage to Ted Hughes, who survived her and became Britain’s poet laureate in 1984. (He died of cancer in 1998.) Hughes’s role in Plath’s adult life (they married in 1956), his behavior in the period just before her death and his subsequent actions as the executor of her literary estate have been at the heart of an interminable argument about Plath’s legacy, and have at times overshadowed her own poetry as well as his.
Many of Plath’s admirers treat her as a martyr and Hughes as, symbolically if not actually, her murderer. Her short life has become, fairly or not, a parable of the stifling of women’s self-expression by a chauvinist literary establishment in the years before feminism. Those more sympathetic to Hughes have preferred to see him as a fellow sufferer, a flawed, talented man married to a gifted woman with a history of mental disturbance, who had first tried to kill herself long before she met him.
Although partisans on both sides may disagree, ”Sylvia,” which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, tries to address the Plath-Hughes marriage even-handedly and resists the urge to turn its heroine’s life into allegory. It is more like opera, which is braver, and also more fitting. Ms. Paltrow looks a lot like Plath and speaks with the right semi-Anglicized American preppy accent, but her performance goes well beyond mimicry. She has a vivid, passionate presence, even when her lively features have gone slack with depression and her bright blue eyes have glazed over.
Daniel Craig is a bit more opaque. In Hughes’s poems, which are full of violent animal imagery, hawks and crows have a special totemic significance, and Mr. Craig, with his craggy, shadowed face, looks like a rangy, wounded bird of prey. His voice is a low growl, and his sexual magnetism, the trait that is the movie’s main concern, is palpable.
The two young poets meet at a party at Cambridge University. At the end of their first kiss, he steals one of her earrings and she bites his cheek, drawing blood. Later, at a small gathering in period-shabby student rooms, they hurl passages of Shakespeare at each other, then tumble into bed. Sex and poetry are linked in this film as if by a high-tension, high-voltage wire, and while the connection may seem facile, it is also, with respect to these writers and their milieu, entirely plausible.
When Ted insists to Sylvia that the true subject of her poetry should be herself, it is worth recalling that, to them, this was not yet a therapeutic cliché but a radical and dangerous creative enterprise. And their fervid, all-consuming desire to be poets is a heady mixture of careerism and more exalted ambitions.
But how to dramatize the creative process and its psychic costs? This is the principal challenge facing any movie about a writer, and it dooms many honorable efforts to either timidity or ridiculousness. (Think of Nicole Kidman, in her Virginia Woolf mask, muttering to those poor daffodils in ”The Hours.”) It helps, in this case, that Ms. Jeffs has a lyrical sensibility that matches her subject. Her jagged, dreamy first feature, ”Rain,” about a teenage girl’s loss of innocence, is at once wide-eyed and pitilessly precise in its psychological insights, qualities it shares with some of Plath’s later verses. Ms. Jeffs’s understanding of Plath, like Ms. Paltrow’s, is deep and sincere, and ultimately more intuitive than analytical. ”Sylvia,” rather than trying to explain Plath, wants to burrow into her personality without disturbing its mysteries.
The dramatic crux of the movie is the triangle that develops between Plath, Hughes and Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), who became Hughes’s second wife, and whose subsequent suicide was a grisly echo of Plath’s. The supporting performances, notably Mr. Harris and Blythe Danner, as Plath’s stern and sympathetic mother, Aurelia, are excellent. But the emotional core of ”Sylvia” lies in the feverish transactions between Ms. Jeffs, Ms. Paltrow and the hovering shade of the poet herself. The psychological dynamics of the marriage, unsettled by professional envy and sexual jealousy, are duly noted, but the film’s emotions are too big, too untidy and too strange to be contained by its story.
John Toon’s cinematography has the thick, oversaturated look of old Technicolor, and the honeyed light that usually surrounds Ms. Paltrow darkens as Plath’s miseries increase. The film itself, somewhat like Todd Haynes’s ”Far From Heaven,” which was set around the same time, is oversaturated with feeling, and also with music, as Gabriel Yared’s feverish score sends a ripple of melodrama through otherwise ordinary scenes.
This may trouble those who insist on austere literalism in their biopics, but it seems to me that a movie about poets — especially about these poets, who use blank verse as an aphrodisiac and who gather around the phonograph to listen to a recording of Robert Lowell reading ”The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” — is entitled to some passionate recklessness of its own.
And the poetry that Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Jeffs enact together compensates somewhat for the film’s skimpy use of Plath’s own words. Toward the end, as she composes the poems that would, when published as ”Ariel,” secure her posthumous reputation, the words rush onto the soundtrack in a jumble of discontinuous lines, and we hear almost nothing of her earlier work (and nothing at all of Hughes’s, though Mr. Craig does a fine recitation of Yeats’s ”Sorrows of Love”).
It is Plath’s writing that represents, after all the polemicizing is done, her surest claim on our attention. The makers of ”Sylvia” may, to some degree, have neglected this brilliant, unsettling and tragically foreshortened body of work, but they have not betrayed it.
Directed by: Christine Jeffs
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Michael Gambon, Blythe Danner, Lucy Davenport, Sarah Guyler, Andrew Havill, Theresa Healey, Liddy Holloway, Robyn Malcolm
Screenplay by: John Brownlow
Film Editing by: Tariq Anwar
Costume Design by: Sandy Powell
Set Decoration by: Philippa Hart
Art Direction by: Jane Cecchi, Joanna Foley, John Hill
Ken Turner
Music by: Gabriel Yared
MPAA Rating: Rated R for sexuality/nudity and language.
Studio: Focus Features
Release Date: october 17, 2003
