Sylvia

Plot synopsis:
(Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932, 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.)
The film begins with a shot of Plath sleeping, then opening her eyes. As a student at Cambridge she rides along on her red bicycle and wearing an academic gown. She hears of a party to celebrate the publishing of a magazine called St. Botolph's, where she meets the young poet Ted Hughes. The two fall in love and marry in 1956, then go off to Massachusetts where her mother lives (Aurelia Plath, played by Paltrow's mother Blythe Danner). While they both are teaching at Smith College. Sylvia quickly learns that others are also enthralled with her husband, for a combination of his good looks, charisma, fame and success. They return to England, first to London and then to Devon, where Sylvia raises their two children and lives in her husband's professional shadow as she tries to eke out her own writing career, which doesn't come as naturally to her as it does to Ted. After a visit by David and Assia Wevill, who had rented their London flat, Sylvia rightly accuses Ted of infidelity. She kicks him out and then begins to write the poems that would be published posthumously in her collection titled Ariel. Sylvia then moves back to London with her children. Ted visits at Christmas and they make love again but he says he cannot leave Assia, who is pregnant. Shortly thereafter she prepares for her suicide, sealing off the children's room from the gas from her gas oven. A nurse comes to take out the children and Ted sees Plath's manuscript on her desk. A closing title informs us that her book made her much beloved and that Ted wrote his response in 1998 (just before his death), in a collection titled The Birthday Letters.

Tags: romantic, autobiographical

Review:
When poet and novelist Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, she became the archetype of the tortured artist - particularly for sensitive young people who came to romanticize her end and her suffering in ways that lifted her and her work to iconic status.The biopic, entitled simply 'Sylvia,' gets the 'tortured' part pretty much right, but has considerably less success with the 'artist.' The film focuses mainly on the tumultuous relationship between Plath and her husband of eight years, famed poet Ted Hughes.
The movie sidesteps the electroshock therapy Plath underwent at various times in her life (though it very subtly hints at them), yet the film still manages to convey just how great a victim she was of this disease she could not overcome.Thanks to John Brownlow's rather singlemindedly depressing screenplay, there's a tremendous feeling of sadness hovering over the film.
Whatever fame she achieved in her life has been eclipsed by what can only be described as a cottage industry of people studying her relationship with Hughes, an activity more important to some than her very fine poems and her most famous book, a novel, "The Bell Jar."  In short, the real Sylvia Plath, whoever she was, has been hijacked.Wells takes a sympathetic view of Ted and Sylvia, not joining in the political debate over feminism and Sylvia's supposed maltreatment by Ted. Sylvia in this film is brilliant but also terribly brittle and her inner demons are not caused by a brutish or callous husband.
A man who only wanted to be a first-rate poet, he became (and still is post mortem) the subject of arguments as to his treatment of Sylvia and his responsibility for her taking her life."Sylvia" sets the record straight as Paltrow acts the part of a woman - mother as well as poet - who slowly loses control of her life while her husband reacts first with confusion and later with the self-protective armor of withdrawal.Hughes went on to publish many fine poems and he became poet laureate of England, a post he definitely wanted and enjoyed (Hughes was one of the very few modern and relatively young intellectuals who was a convinced monarchist).Not long before succumbing to cancer, Hughes published "Birthday Letters," an attempt to show through years of verse the nature of his relationship with Sylvia.
It analyzes the poets' relationship through the prism of Hughes's writings, most unpublished before "Birthday Letters." A recent book, "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, Portrait of a Marriage," by Diane Middlebrook, is also recommended.Incidentally, the film accurately shows Sylvia's suicide preparations which included putting breakfast next to her little kids' beds before opening their window wide and sealing their door so the gas she employed to dispatch herself wouldn't harm them.
Most people might agree that poetry offers something special, so a film celebrating the life of a famous poet might be expected to bring us a glimmer of that something.Sylvia Plath has been championed not only as a poet but as a sort of feminist'  a cry on behalf of women treated as a commodity, subjugated by an unfair male-dominated system.
Cast in the lead role, Gwyneth Paltrow's Plath focuses much attention on how downtrodden she was, chained to two children, overshadowed by a brilliant and celebrated Ted Hughes, struggling with bitterness, jealousy, mental instability and a less than attractive persona.
Rather dull and uninspired biography, even though Gwyneth does a good performance, she's unable to save a biography which probably will make your own life look exciting - Sylvia Plath is portrayed as not much more than a quite ordinary housewife that is cheated on over several years.
She has her "Rain" cinematographer John Toon bathe the entire film in a nostalgia-tinged amber glow, like the extended flashbacks to the young lovers in the Australian film "Innocence."  I think the point is to determinedly place Plath and her husband poet Ted Hughes into their specific time at the cusp before "The Feminine Mystique" put a name to Plath's frustrations and contradictions as a Fulbright scholar - experimental poet turned wife and mother who ultimately turned on herself.
While they are competing for editors' accolades and print space, she's setting her hair, arranging her pearls and cleaning house, like a proper Smith graduate of the time who is perfectly at home visiting her Boston mother (played by real-life mom Blythe Danner) and amidst the books of her late bee scholar father (My friend the PhD in English tells me that the original film title of "The Bee-Keeper's Daughter" would have been fraught with much more significance about Plath's obsessions.) 
I am terrified to believe that the millions of people who watched this movie without actually understanding who Sylvia Plath was, her intellect, her raw and beautifully successful poetry, will come away from this movie thinking she was an untalented, petty, nagging, weak, depressed housewife who never came up with a single poem.
What the viewer gets is the portrait of a delicate, too sensitive, but innerly tortured woman, without having to face too much, as a form of respect towards the woman and her painful life, as if (and indeed it is), depression and mental disorder were something belonging to such depth of a soul that trying to render it too explicitly becomes a misleading, fake, if not disrespectful attempt; the final result being intense but never obtrusive.A little underdeveloped, maybe, is the relationship with the mother, and in general we are not given he chance to know much about Sylvia's childhood, when her mental problems began to trouble her, but on the whole the movie is well focused and gets to render the complexity of her personality: strong and weak, self-confident and depressed, longing for life but falling into an always evoked death.
Plath's well known life history is covered in straightforward biopic narrative: her close-distant, love-hate yo-yo relationship with her mother; her famous first suicide attempt and the subsequent year spent in a sanatorium that was the basis for The Bell Jar; her rocky marriage to British poet Ted Hughes that ended because of his infidelity; her prolific period as a celebrated poet and her eventual death by suicide while still young.I should point out that I thought the cinematography and production design were wonderful.
It is still reasonably interesting but I didn't feel that I learnt anything specific about Plath other than the fact that she was with a man that wasn't particularly good for her  which puts her in the company of a lot of woman; the difference between her and them was her poetry but the film doesn't seem too bothered about this.The upside of this is that Paltrow is best in the role when she is being downtrodden and oppressed; when she is asked to do something other than this then she seems less sure of her character and is less able  at least depressed she seems to know what is required of her.
The support is mostly pretty good, although I didn't understand what attracted Michael Gambon to such a small role, but the film pretty much belongs to Paltrow, who takes to her downtrodden well.Overall this was an average film that plays out like a relationship melodrama and didn't do much to help me understand the character or talent of Plath other than showing me what happened within her relationship with Hughes.
Sylvia Plath, while being a brilliant writer, was also a deeply disturbed and  fragile woman having tryed to commit suicide at least twice before she ever met Hughes, and to suggest that his affair was responsible for her death is misleading.
I think if the filmmakers were really concerned about telling the audience the story of Sylvia Plath they should of focused on her whole life, not just her marriage to Hughes, and if they were commited to the tragic love story they should of focused more on the passionate love and less on the jealousy and bitterness.
A bit or some of such things can be handled but not to the extent that the audience gets bored by the idea of thinking again and again to understand things in the movie.The movie could have been the director's work if it would have been able to show Sylvia Plath's heart but the whole credit for the movie goes to Gwyneth Paltrow for being able to try to show the things director could not have a hold of.
I decided to watch this movie since Gwyneth Paltrow is starring as Sylvia and i heard some good reviews on the movie.To be honest, I don't read poetry at all, so I have no idea how Sylvia is talented and admired in the field.When i was watching this movie, i was just so drawn into Gwyneth's acting.Well.., the story itself is, as you know, telling how Sylvia was straggling with the relationship with her husband and how much poem meant to her life.I could see Sylvia's depression in her life through Gwyneth's great acting.The story goes kind of slowly and really focuses on Sylvia.I hope to see some development in the character of her husband, but considering to make her life into 2hrs movie, I cannot say anything about that.Personally, I liked this movie and enjoyed it, but I understand some people don't like it.If you can be satisfied with a great acting, you should check this out..
Somehow, I think there's probably much more to the life story of suicidal poetess Sylvia Plath than just her unsatisfying marriage to gad-about poet Ted Hughes.
It begins on the very day when the American Plath meets her English poet husband-to-be Ted Hughes, and it ends just a few years later with her death by suicide.
Some people blame Hughes for Plath's suicide in 1963.The film begins when American Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University where she meets acclaimed and passionate Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) a man who lives for poetry.They quickly get married and initially move to the USA.
They return to Britain, but Sylvia struggles with Ted's infidelity, his success as a writer while she raises two young children.However in time Sylvia starts to develop her own style of poetry which is based on her personal moods and state of mind.Craig gives a passionate performance as Hughes, he comes across as fiery, talented and a ladies man.
The film makes it clear that Plath had bouts of depression and even attempted suicide before she met Hughes.Sylvia cannot get a handle on the complexities of the characters that it is dealing with.
We can debate whether it's better for a biopic to focus more on the subject's work or the subject's life, but I think that it's good to have a frame of reference (in this case, Plath's unfulfilled existence).Gwyneth Paltrow puts on a pretty grim performance as Plath, while Daniel Craig makes Ted Hughes look like a real creep.
It's the first time that Gwyneth Paltrow really impressed me; she interprets wonderfully Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) in this historically accurate biopic of the clinically depressed and bipolar poetess who committed suicide at the early age of 30.Even though the story starts in Cambridge, at the University where the 20 something year old Sylvia was studying, right when she meets the poet and writer Ted Hughes, there are enough hints to learn about her previous tormented life as well.The movie depicts how the two like-minded, Sylvia and Ted Hughes (a very good Daniel Craig), fall in love, encouraging and inspiring each other passionately in the same literary field.
Therefore, biographically a tad chopped to my taste.Later many feminists accused Ted Hughes of having had jeopardised Sylvia's creativity and even boycotted her to be successful out of fear of competition, I guess a little bit in the same way as August Rodin stepped on Camille Claudel.Beautifully filmed with the colours and shades of a 50's movie and the touching soundtrack suits perfectly, setting the right mood to the individual frames and some recited poems.
The film was well balanced and not unduly critical of Ted Hughes, a figure still much-vilified by the feminist lobby as being responsible for Sylvia Plath's mental disintegration and death.Daniel Craig's striking similarity to Hughes adds that extra something to his fine performance.
This film largely takes on Plath's life though her relationship with Ted Hughes, a well-known and respected poet of his day.
`I feel like God is speaking through me.'  Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow breathed life into the title character she plays in her new movie, `Sylvia' along with co-star Daniel Craig.
Now while prior to watching this movie I was not aware of American poetess Sylvia Platt (played by Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie), at least it gave me good start to her life and everything else in between.This movie first began with her university days at Cambridge and it's where she met Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), her future husband.
Christine Jeffs (2003) biographical film of the life of American poet Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) is set mainly in Boston and Cambridge in the 1950's.
It documents her troubled marriage to the eventual British poet laureate Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig).Considering that Sylvia Plath's life was destined to be a dark tragedy from the time her father died until she eventually took her own life, this film manages to give a sensitive and balanced view of her fragile existence and the bleak helplessness of the people who surrounded her and loved her as best they could in these difficult times.Professor Thomas (Michael Gambon) stands out in the film as a truly helpless bystander who is painfully aware of the incomprehensible hopelessness of Sylvia's situation yet somehow touches the spirit of it with something as simple as candles and matches in a power cut.
If you want to know more about that read "The Bell Jar" which is a memoir disguised as a novel.The person with whom I watched this movie was not at all interested in Plath's work or her life.
Gwyneth Paltrow does a good job of portraying Plath, and Daniel Craig is decent as Ted Hughes.
Despite Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig's solid performances, this filmsuffers from a sketchy script that rushes past the important elements of therelationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes to reinforce a set of cliches.
One could not really pinpoint to where the fault is and what is lacking in the adaptation of this Sylvia Plath's biography.Daniel Craig makes us despise his Ted Hughes, a man who went to bigger and better things while his wife, who obviously was more talented in her short life.
That's a problem, given that the two main characters are Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, two of the more celebrated poets of their time, and doubtless the lack of their work in the movie stems from the hostility of their respective literary estates to the making of this film.
The company credits read that this was a BBC film funded by the arts council which could only mean one thing - It's of little interest to anyone who didn't work on the movie , but to be fair I was pleasantly surprised as to how the story drew me in This is a bio-pic on Sylvia Plath the wife of famous poet Laurette Ted Hughes .
Also, from the description of the way Sylvia and Ted met (love at first sight and how she bit his cheek), I thought there would be more fiery passion in the movie.But if there is anything more boring than watching a depressed woman sit around and think about committing suicide, I wish you would tell me!
Gwyneth Paltrow was fine in the part, but the movie did nothing to make me understand why so many people think Sylvia Plath's work was so great.
Ted Hughes is treated in a much better light than is usual in the analysis of this particular subject, the film in parts seemingly blaming Sylvia for the problems which so famously caused her to take her own life.A nice idea, but perhaps a more balanced and in-depth analysis of the intense relationship between these two great minds would be preferable.
ANYTHING to portray an interesting, REAL person and to relieve the monotony of all the pseudo-artsy posing that goes on in the film.)In short, this movie sucks every bit of life out of Plath, portraying her as a zombie-like character almost from the get-go, when in fact we know from reading her own words that there was actually a thinking, feeling, LIVING person on the premises up until the very end..
It doesn't go into enough depth for a love story or for Scenes From a Marriage, Times Literary Supplement style."Sylvia" is the airplane movie of Plath's life.
A more appropriate title for Christine Jeffs' film would have been "Ted and Sylvia" as we only pick up poet Sylvia Plath's (Gwyneth Paltrow) life from the time when she met fellow poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig).
"Sylvia" from 2003 is basically the story of poet Sylvia Plath's relationship with her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, rather than the story of Plath's life, therapy, or evolution as a writer.Someone here put it best -- Plath suffered from depression from the time of her father's death when she was 9 years old, but she also had an almost manic energy which enabled her to churn out her work...and the mania in this film is sadly lacking.
This biography of the relationship between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is beautifully played out in this film.
This film tells the real-life story of the complex relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, two famous poets who were married to one another.
I've wanted to see this movie for quite some time, so you can imagine my disappointment when I found a shallow and almost un-sympathetic retelling of the great Sylvia Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes.The story at first felt very rushed and then just seemed to drag on.