There's a scene at the beginning of Annie Hall where Alvy (Woody Allen), in a nervous attempt to impress Annie (Diane Keaton), begins thumbing through the volume of Sylvia Plath poetry that lies on her coffee table. Eager to prove his intellectual prowess, Alvy clears his throat and tries to appear casual as he remarks, "Sylvia Plath…interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality." Unfazed, Annie counters, "Well, I don't know…some of her poems seemed neat."
Regardless of whether one's opinion of Plath's poetry lies closer to Alvy's or to Annie's, the indisputable fact conveyed by this scene is that by the late 1970s, spurred by the inroads made by the women's rights movement, Sylvia Plath had become an icon. Indeed, Christine Jeffs's film Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the doomed poetess, presupposes a certain knowledge on the part of the audience about Plath and her short, tragic life, and dives us headfirst into the action with a shot of the young woman frantically pedaling her bike through the narrow streets of Cambridge.
Shortly thereafter, the film, originally titled Ted & Sylvia but pared down to accurately reflect the movie's focus, introduces us to Ted Hughes, the brooding Yorkshire poet whose seven-year marriage to Plath would end in disaster and make him the target of feminist critics who blamed him for her death and angrily tried to scratch the name "Hughes" off her gravestone. To its credit, Sylvia contains no such accusations, opting instead for a more balanced portrait of their marriage which gives equal weight to Hughes's legendary philandering and Plath's crippling depression and paranoia.
Shot in butterscotch hues set to evoke a bygone era, the camera evocatively captures Hughes and Plath's dizzying first encounter at a party in Cambridge (where Plath, an American, was studying on a Fulbright Scholarship) where, she would later recall in her journal, "we shouted as if in high wind…and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth…and when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek." Cast as Hughes, Daniel Craig may lack Hughes's hulking stature, but he ably embodies the poet's dark, brooding qualities and magnetic, if quiet, charm. Still, by the end of the film Hughes remains an enigmatic presence, which is perhaps appropriate given his long silence on the matter of his first wife, a reticence that was not broken until the eve of his death in 1998 with the publication of "Birthday Letters," a volume of poetry largely addressed to Plath.
Paltrow, however, boldly lays bare the demons that haunted Sylvia Plath, in the process turning in what is probably her best performance to date. Whereas her Margot Tenenbaum (the character she played in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums ) carried a blithe sadness that relied on dark eyeliner and a heavy fur coat for dimensionality, here she delves deep into the dark cloud of depression that Plath could never seem to escape. What emerges is a more realistic depiction of mental illness which is seldom given a showcase onscreen. Whereas the filmic portrait generally includes teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling (e.g. Girl, Interrupted ) or sweating and drooling (e.g. Shine ), Sylvia takes pains to show Plath's daily struggle with a sadness that threatened to overcome her at anytime. Rather than including several scenes of her crying hysterically, Christine Jeffs instead opts to convey Plath's mental and physical exhaustion, her anxiety about being a good wife and mother while also trying to fulfill her creative needs, and the paranoia and jealously which led her to suspect (sometimes accurately, sometimes misleadingly) her husband of infidelity.
It remains unfortunate that the filmmakers were unable to secure the permission of Plath and Hughes's daughter to use any of their poetry within the film. This, along with the film's plodding, melodramatic score (which seems better suited to production of "Masterpiece Theater"), is Sylvia's main detraction, for it is these poems more than anything else that would have been able to provide a window into just how deeply troubled Plath was. Although the movie's restraint in showing Plath?s final breakdown is admirable, it fails to effectively demonstrate the full degree to which she was suffering, a condition that the violence of her words written during that period (posthumously released in a collection entitled "Ariel") would have undoubtedly amplified. Still, with or without these poems, Sylvia is a moving, realistic portrait of an artist struggling to find a place for herself in a world where she always feels like an outsider looking in.
Copyright © Beth Gilligan 2002-2005
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