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I watched this movie as suggested by a friend, knowing nothing about the poetess Sylvia Plath, except some biographical hints, which can be a fault (in the sense of a too much unconscious and unprepared approach) but also an advantage, since you are in a condition to judge the movie for what it is and without any prejudice. I perceived the movie as a delicate, intelligent, and artfully crafted portrait of a woman, whose inner psychological distress overwhelmed her and affected her artistic life so much as to become one thing with it.
What I certainly appreciated is the modest and almost detached attitude the director chose to deal with the theme, the never excessive underlining of too torturing traits of the poetess' s grieve. 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. A movie that gets also to stimulate the reading of her works, and that's, I believe, a great result. Gwyneth Paltrow is really convincing, intense, but always contained, David Craig as Ted Hughes also offers a mature and good performance.
score 8/10
yris2002 10 June 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2078999/ |
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20-2-2021 12:05:10