Film Reviews

Sylvia

• Rating:
• Director: Christine Jeffs
• Starring: Blythe Danner
• Details: UK / 115 mins / (18).

Earnest, heartfelt and vaguely boring, 'Sylvia' is an ultra conventional biopic of the doomed American writer and poet, Sylvia Plath. An elegant Gwyneth Paltrow does a fine job of playing Plath, who we first meet in 1950s Cambridge. She's taken by the words of another young poet, Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) and soon after their wordy first meeting, the pair fall hopelessly in love. In whirlwind fashion, they marry, retreating to Plath's New England home base. But with Plath's own writing career on hold, and her husband's almost effortless success, cracks soon start to appear in the union. Throw a couple of kids into the mix, and Hughes' incorrigible womanising, and there's a recipe for disaster a brewin'.
Since the narrative follows such a straightforward trajectory, there's not an awful lot to admire in 'Sylvia' beyond the performances. Though she's perhaps a little too glamorous for the role, Paltrow gives a fine performance as Plath; while Craig's natural intensity finds a good home in the character of Hughes. Yet the problem with 'Sylvia' is two-fold - far too little time is given to the writings she produced (the fact that the executor of Plath's estate - her daughter, Frieda Hughes - refused to give her blessings may have something to do with that, however). More distressing is the lack of real scope and dimension afforded to the complexities of the Hughes-Plath bond. There's no real sense of the dynamics of the union and the overpowering score by Gabriel Yared is far too melodramatic, a horribly manipulative attempt to inject some emotional resonance into a relationship that had more than its fair share of it.

Review by Garreth Murphy