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Sylvia
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This biopic of Sylvia Plath tackles two of the hardest subjects to
put convincingly on film: poetry and depression.
The latter is expressed in endless, fuzzy, arty images of Sylvia
(Gwyneth Paltrow) ‘tangled up in blue’, rigid against a wall, her face set in a
forbidding composite of anger and misery.
As for the poetry, there are several photogenic possibilities.
Either we see Plath and Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) in their respective cluttered
studies, furiously scribbling and crossing out words as if in an ecstasy of
creativity; or, even worse, we are treated to a supposedly spontaneous
Beat-style jam session where the poetic players try to outdo each other in
skill, speed and wit. It is like watching a corny 1950s
Plath is a writer whose work has haunted several generations of
readers, and whose myth (as the Suffering Female Artist par excellence) will
not soon be laid to rest. John Brownlow's script for this film boils that myth
so far down to its essentials that there is almost nothing left.
Plath falls in love at
Cambridge,
cuts her ties with her American homeland, and then finds herself trapped in a
cold, domestic hell while Hughes pursues other women. Alone again, she briefly
rekindles her creativity, but by then depression has her in its malign grip.
Every moderately well-read viewer knows that Plath killed herself,
and the film
knows that we know. Therefore, New Zealand director Christine Jeffs heaps on
the melancholic, death-driven imagery from the very first frame: Sylvia with
her eyes closed, Sylvia asleep, Sylvia immobile under a bath's waterline ...
Oddly, this imagery often repeats what Jeffs did in her debut feature, Rain (2001), to the extent that one suspects
she was hired for the job on that very basis.
Sylvia feels hollow
at its centre. It allots little time and space to Plath's actual texts, and
without those we have a banal tale of unhappiness that wanders about looking
for some cosmic significance. But Hughes is simply not that big a monster that
he can stand for an entire, oppressive, patriarchal social structure; and
Plath's plight never grips us as it should. The film exudes a distant,
ceremonial air.
The most glaring index of the film's superficiality is the
treatment of Plath's and Hughes' children. These tiny creatures never register
as real, living beings with needs and personalities. Sometimes they can be
glimpsed at the end of some glum shot of Paltrow imploding, as if they are pure
decoration, or an illustration of the poet's unhappiness.
By the time we reach the suicide scene, the film's indifference to
the children's reactions has become almost offensively callous. Is this because
the film wants to show Plath as completely wrapped up in her misery? If so, the point is not made strongly enough.
The film is clearly a labour of love – sad love – that has been
made with grim conviction. The actors certainly give it their all; apart from
the leading players, Jared Harris is also excellent as the publisher Al
Alvarez, who has an especially difficult moment fending off Plath's desperate
sexual advances.
Sylvia, however,
comes in a long way behind the outstanding artist biopic Pollock (2000). That movie took
on an equally mythic, suffering artist, whose path was just as morbidly
predictable, but it delved deeply into many aspects of the painter's milieu, as
well as into the knots and explosions of the creative process.
By contrast, Sylvia Plath is delivered to us here like a specimen
under glass.
© Adrian Martin February 2004
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