Film Review: Sylvia (2003)

If you want to win an Oscar in acting categories, it helps if the character being played is person with serious physical or mental afflictions. If the film is biopic about an important cultural icon elderly Academy voters might recognise, chances are even better. Although Gwyneth Paltrow had already won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, she apparently thought she could repeat the same achievement by playing protagonist of Sylvia, 2003 film directed by Christine Jeffs.

Paltrow plays Sylvia Plath, young woman from highly respected family of Boston scholars who has shown talent for poetry from her childhood days. The plot begins in 1950s when she receives a Fulbright scholarship and travels to England to attend Cambridge University. There she meets and falls madly in love with Ted Hughes (played by Daniel Craig), rugged and handsome man with whom she shares passion and talent for poetry. The marry and have two children, but Sylvia’s life is anything but happy, mainly due to her mood swings and constant struggle with depression, the very same issue that would inspire her work and make her one of the most famous American female poets of 20th Century. Her mental state is further affected by increasingly strained relation with Ted who neglects and mistreats her. Sylvia begins to suspect her husband’s infidelity, and those suspicions are proven correct when he begins affair with beautiful Assia Wevill (played by Amira Casar). She and Ted separate and in 1963 the depression, that had plagued her all her life, would take a final and deadly toll.

Bringing great literature on screen is always a challenge, even more so when the literature in question happens to be poetry instead of prose. Even more challenging is the film that is supposed to use such literature in the films about its author. For Christine Jeffs and her scriptwriter John Brownlow the challenge was even greater because Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter, had refused to allow BBC Films, studio behind the project, to use her mother’s property. A creative film maker would have found a way to work around it, but Jeffs apparently lacked talent and inclination. Sylvia instead relies on the audience being educated enough or already familiar with Plath’s work in order to fill the blanks left by the script. For those who have little knowledge of Plath or her status of grand feminist martyr, the film is, despite Paltrow doing a decent job in her role, rather dark, depressive, bleak and ultimately boring film about depressed woman being oppressed by forces of patriarchy in bleak post-WW2 England and America, a story that had been told so many times by more talented and inspired film makers. Paltrow’s pairing with her real life mother Blythe Danner in the role of protagonist’s mother only adds element of annoying Hollywood artificiality to this pointless film.

RATING: 2/10 (-)

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