Sylvia ** (2003, Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Lucy Davenport) – Classic Movie Review 1711

Director Christine Jeffs’s 2003 film examines the painful, depressingly sad true story of married poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, with all the little and large events of their troubled lives unfortunately underlined with horribly overscored music by Gabriel Jared.

The couple meet as undergraduates at Cambridge, and it’s love at first sight. Then a meeting of minds and a shared passion for poetry soon follow, but it’s all to collapse eventually thanks to the fragile Sylvia’s mental instability and Ted’s blatant, serial womanising. They marry, Ted becomes a published poet, a writer’s-blocked Sylvia becomes jealous and depressed, they relocate to America, but that doesn’t work out and they return to a humble home in England.

A well-cast Gwyneth Paltrow gives an elegant and quite effective performance as Sylvia, but John Brownlow’s screenplay is all rather unsubtle and uneven. Also the film is murky and cheap looking, and this BBC Films film runs like a TV play and not really a movie at all.

In the often struggling, unbalanced script, Hughes is demonised as the villain of the piece, giving fine actor Daniel Craig (in his pre-Bond days) a hard task to play him effectively. Poignantly performing with her real daughter, Blythe Danner is spot on in her cameo as Paltrow’s character’s American mom, Aurelia Plath.

Paltrow has a heart-rending speech about the death of her character’s father in the movie, in a scene filmed soon after the early sudden death of her real-life film director dad, Bruce Paltrow.

Lucy Davenport, Jared Harris, Michael Gambon, Amira Casar, Andrew Havill, Liddy Holloway, David Birkin, Alison Bruce, Julian Firth, Jeremy Fowlds and Michael Mears co-star.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1711

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