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***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** After being forewarned by the teenager selling tickets to "Sylvia"--"I hope you like 'depressing', 'cause this is REALLY depressing" ("Oh, I do, I do," I reassured him)--I spent the next 2 hours completely alone in the theater, which was somehow appropriate...
Paltrow was competent, Daniel Craig as Ted was appropriately brooding and charismatic. That said, I found the film to be little more than a series of mainly gloomy vignettes rather than a more accurately energetic glimpse into her actual life.
From everything I've read about Plath (all of her works, plus over 10 critical and/or biographical books), the woman was a crackling force of both manic and depressive energy--this film, on the other hand, almost completely ignores the manic life (and death) force in favor of a pervasive listlessness. Even the scenes that we know from Plath's journals happened in real-life are dulled-down here: Plath's bang-smash account of her sexually-charged initial meeting with Hughes, for instance, which we know resulted in tooth-marks on Hughes' face and his snatching her hair-band, is rendered as little more than a fairly polite dance and kiss in the movie--you get little sense of the urgency and excitement of their attraction. Another scene, rendered far more cinematically in Plath's journals and in Hughes' poem "Chaucer", is her enchantment of the local cows with her recitation of The Wife of Bath's Tale---in reality, the cows apparently gathered around her as she spoke, entranced by her voice, and Ted had to literally drive them away. When I read THEIR accounts, I could feel the magic of the odd situation; in the movie, though, Plath speaks a few lines to watching cows as she and Ted row past them on the river. Ho-hum.
While the two lived in Boston, Plath not only taught at Smith, but later entered weekly analysis, worked at a local mental hospital because Ted wouldn't get a job, and hung out with fellow poets at Lowell's weekly workshop, then got drunk with Anne Sexton, for one, afterwards. Again, that's all pretty darn cinematic; but in the movie, the Boston life consists primarily of a few seconds of Plath droning on before a class or two, then a scene of women gathering around Hughes after a reading. Yes, they do have a fight after Sylvia asks Ted if he f***ed (the movie's word) one woman; but her own written account of the scene was rather wild, with thrown glasses, her "getting hit" and seeing stars, etc., rather than the bland conversational incarnation of the incident that shows up here.
In London and Devon, too: In actuality, up 'til near the end, Plath was constantly in motion: setting up households, sending their work out, going to literary events, having babies, entertaining a myriad of friends and family and neighbors. Dido Merwin and Olwyn Hughes have both left testaments to Sylvia's sometime-hostility on occasion; Plath's own friends have left warmer accounts. Whatever the case, she was interacting with others, for better and worse, and much more interestingly than in this movie, wherein she mainly mopes around the house in a series of grim solitary poses. (PLEASE, I feel like begging, show her getting mad at Olwyn for smoking, or angrily striding out onto the moors after an argument at Ted's family's house, or yelling at Ted about the damn rabbit traps or his Ouija-predicted fame, or expressing her frustration at her mother's annoying visit. 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.
score /10
augustdane 12 November 2003
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0881334/ |
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20-2-2021 12:05:04