Sylvia
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.79 You Save: $11.19 (75%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.33 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of Sylvia
Movie Review: Your ice-hearted calling...
Summary: 5 Stars
A powerful and well-intentioned film, with a great cast.
If I have a problem, it is that the portrayal of Hughes is a little generous, and there was no real attempt to get inside Plath's head. We know the what and the how, but there was no real attempt to explain the why.
Nor was there any mention of the fact that, in 1969, Assia gassed herself and her daughter to death - even as a footnote.
Plath was one of the finest poets of all time, yet all we ever hear in the movie are tiny fragments of her genius.
"The Hours", featuring an inspired Nicole Kidman, did a far better job on the life of Virginia Woolf, but that is no fault of a superb Paltrow and Craig, who did everything they could with what they had to work with.
Great performances throughout, but the film could have been way deeper.
Movie Review: The life and death of Slyvia Plath, but without the poetry
Summary: 4 Stars
There was a point early on when I was struck by the thought of the degree to which the 2003 film "Sylvia" is burdened with our knowledge that in the end Sylvia Plath is going to stick her head in an oven in one of the most famous suicides of the 20th century. The next thing I know Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) is telling Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) that to write poetry she just needs to pick a subject "and stick her head in it." Ouch.Of course the great irony is that Ted Hughes' infidelity inspired Plath's best work and her suicide made her immortal. However, I would be inclined to think the admirers of Plath's poetry are going to be disappointed for two major reasons. First, the screenplay by John Brownlow establishes from the beginning of the film the idea that Plath was a suicide waiting to happen. A suicide attempt that almost succeeded before she went to college in England becomes the key to everything that happens follows and for those who have blame Hughes for Plath's death there is considerably less support for that idea than they might expect to see. The precipitous event, if you would put your finger on one thing in the film, ends up being the pregnancy of the woman with whom he was having an affair. The argument been that Plath killed herself because her husband had left her for another woman (a fellow poet named Assia Wevill, who was also married), but there is a certain ambiguity to the scene where Hughes speaks more of not being able to return. You can see that in the film if you want to find it, but objectively the film puts most of the responsibility on Plath. Nor does it point out that Wevill would eventually kill herself and the daughter she had by Hughes, using gas, just as Plath did, which certainly strike you as an additional condemnation as well.
Second, and this point applies more to those of us who are not really familiar with the poetry of either Plath or Hughes, the film is pretty much devoid of their work. Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter and literary executor, refused to cooperate with the producers of this film, specifically refusing to allow them access to her mother's poetry, and also publicly denounced the film in a published poem of her own: "They think/ I should give them my mother's words/ To fill the mouth of their monster/ Their Sylvia suicide doll." Granted, it is difficult to make a film that captures the literary experience of writing, but it is certainly easier if you are dealing with poetry or drama (i.e., "Shakespeare in Love") than a novel. I have to believe that this would have been a powerful film that celebrated Plath's creativity at the same time it depicts her hurtling towards death.
Plath's poems were passionate about death and I can well imagine those who have committed some of her poems to memory inserting them at the right points in the film. Despite solid performances by Paltrow and Craig the end result is that "Slyvia" is an incomplete performance, smacking of voyeurism rather than an attempt at understanding. This would be akin to watching "Amadeus" without the music of "Girl With a Pearl Earring" without the paintings.
Movie Review: Intense film about an intense figure
Summary: 4 Stars
"Sylvia" does a solid job of communicating the tragedy of Plath's life to devoted readers and the average viewer alike: Gwyneth Paltrow gives a notable performance as the disturbed, intense, and tragically flawed poetess who, with only two collections of verse, changed the face of modern poetry and never lived to bask in the fruits of her own greatness.
Since Plath's suicide a lot of baseless assumptions have been made from her work and certain aspects of her tumultuous, but very accomplished, life: the most absurd of which is that husband and poet Ted Hughes was somehow responsible for her self-immolation. If only it were that simple.
As shown very candidly in this film, Sylvia Plath was a woman with the ambition of a Caesar and the ego of Alexander the Great. The unrelenting pressure she put on herself to produce poetry (without which we might not have "Daddy", "Ariel"?) may have accelerated whatever imbalance she had to begin with. Before she even met Hughes a serious suicide attempt had been made. Her intensity was painful and frightening.
Not that the marriage helped--Hughes was a womanizing alcoholic who was more than willing to set aside ethical qualms to satisfy his slightest whims. In later life this all caught up to him and he developed something of a conscience, but by then it was far too late and he had left two dead women and one murdered child in his wake.
This movie gets very dark very fast, as you might expect. At the beginning, though, we are treated to a realistic and vivid portrayal of two great poets meeting one another in the heat of the muse's grip: reciting poetry with the speed of a computer, obsessing over every second that passes without a word written, and flinging verses at each other, some of them medieval and archaic.
Another reviewer said there "wasn't much of the writing" in the film. I'd have to disagree. While Hughes poems and Plath's poems aren't given exclusive attention, we hear Chaucer, Yeats, Lowell, and hosts of other poets referenced and quoted continually.
Even with the contagious romanticism of the film and of the poet's lives,
Plath and figures like her (Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and similar male poets) have left some very dangerous and negative stereotypes as a result of their self-destruction. Decadence is miserable and not creative in the slightest. Poetry is particularly prone to this myth. After the movie I wondered: what if Plath had thought about her poetry before she stuck her head in that oven? Or her children? Imagine what poetry we would have today. All that aside, this is definitely a worthwhile film for anyone interested in the life of a real poet.
Movie Review: A growing moody storm of a life
Summary: 4 Stars
The film Sylvia deals with the second half of poet Sylvia Plath's life, primarily on her marriage and motherhood and final great creative efforts. It is a tragic tale. It is tragic for within the wonderful creative person is growing depression, anxiety, and suspicion. The film reminds us that the human condition is fragile despite the strength and brilliance of creativity and genius. Of course there has been much back and forth around who was right and who was wrong in the Ted Hughes-Sylvia Plath marriage. I must say that the film is extremely fair and even-handed, never fully taking the part of Hughes over Plath or Plath over Hughes.
It is extremely difficult to make an interesting movie about a depressed creative genius and at least this film attempts to explore the untreated clinical depression that plagued Plath and made her life miserable and drove her husband away. What a complete tragedy that the artist found that the very quality within her that was making her miserable also drove away the person she loved most and thus even made her more miserable. Is there any character in mythology who found that the more they approached the beloved, the more the very act of approach drove the beloved away? This was the dilemma that Plath faced.
I was also touched by the struggle that Plath underwent being pulled into the world of the living by her children, her guilt about leaving them motherless, and yet the depressed undercurrent continually pulling her into the land of the dead. There is a scene of almost unspeakable pain where Plath puts her children in a car and drives to the ocean where she plans to drown herself. She looks back at the car before walking into the rough surf and sees the tiny innocent eyes of her children watching her every move. She just could not kill herself at that point and reluctantly and defeated she returns to the world of the living.
Yet there is a flaw in the film that is difficult to address. For basically we see a terrible tragedy of a depressed woman lose her husband through jealousy and insecurity and then finally commit suicide and yet we only get a few glimpses of her brilliance. What a struggle her life must have been and yet there were periods of great creativity as evidenced by her life's work
Gwyneth Paltrow does a great job and is perfectly matched by Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes. The photography and art direction are a concert in gray and black, moody colors to match the brooding depression in Sylvia's mind.
Movie Review: Distinctly lacking a sense of Sylvia...
Summary: 4 Stars
The fudemental truth about Sylvia Plath was that her life almost constantly balanced between creation and destruction. Paltrow gets a sense of this across but only to the degree that we see how this ingrained trait destroyed her relationship with Hughes and ultimatey her. Paltrow gives a credible performance as I feel the sense of lacking derives from a "phase" focussed script, that is that the script looks solely at the struggles of the Hughes/Plath relationship and their need to both achieve in the literary world and steer a smooth personal course which gave both what they needed. The film pays lip service to Sylvia's sense of early loss and the damage this inflicted on her adult personality, which in my estimation, left her feeling half a soul and half a bleak and empty vessel filled only with pain and pointlessness. In this sense the potrayal, intense as it is, displays a woman who is desperately needy and at times intensely irritating and fickle, for no apparant reason.
A woman who seemingly sows the seeds of her own destruction, with little sense of the root of her desperate and highly damaged sense of self, to add this dimension would have done Plath more credit.
The portayal from script, of Hughes is infinitely more sympathetic and one feels a truer sense of his attempt to provide Plath with all she her needs, and the growing realisation that this is impossible and that he will fall foul of her focussed destruction and seemingly powerless to change it, it seems here his affair was almost inevitable. An interesting point which would have displayed the toxicity of Plaths inner most destruction is that the woman Hughes left her for killed herself and her daughter just three years after Sylvia died.
As good as Paltrow is I could not help feel an older actress may have brought the sense of who and why Sylvia was rahter just give us a one dimesional portrayal of her destruction and creation. But I imagine her in lies the quandry since Plath was just 31 when she died so to give the role to say a Meryl Streep just would not work chronologically. Craig's performance was the better of the two for me, so intensley studied as to get both the accent and sound of Hughes absolutely perfect.
A worthy attempt all round, nonetheless, to convey some of what was an enormously interesting and tortured life.