Sylvia

Directed by Christine Jeffs

Written by John Brownlow

Starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig

Rated R for sexuality/nudity and language

110 minutes runtime

The story told in the book, “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath still ranks as one of the most vivid recorded descriptions of a downward spiral into insanity.  Plath had everything going for her as she grew up in the 1940s.  She was attractive and smart and her family had great plans for her.  Maybe too great.  But, for whatever reasons, she tried to kill herself a couple of times and finally succeeded when she was in her early 30s. 

This tragedy is all the more significant in consideration of the wonderful stories and poetry that she left behind, much of which she wrote after she met and married future British Poet Laureate Edward (Ted) Hughes.  Taking up where “Bell Jar” leaves off, “Sylvia” is the story of the last half dozen years of Plath’s life.  If you are a Plath aficionado, or just love to try and figure out what makes great artists tick, this is a must-see movie for you.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Sylvia Plath in one of the best performances of her career.  She takes us through the petulant days of youth when marginal behavior is quickly forgiven and on to adulthood when it is not.  Being crazy can be fun when you are young and have the flexibility and stamina to fight it off temporarily with various self-medications and haphazard sexual encounters.  But after Plath married and suddenly had two babies to care for, the world started closing in.

Daniel Craig plays Ted Hughes in a stirring rendition of a man totally immersed in himself.  The work of Edward Hughes has gone down in British history as some of the best the nation has to offer and Hughes apparently devoted himself to it to the exclusion of all else, including his wife and children.  There is not enough information available in the two stories, this one and “Bell Jar,” to ascertain whether Hughes could have saved Plath from suicide.  But the story line in “Sylvia” is that he hardly tried.

Hughes and Plath were on the fast track to success, with Ted in the lead, when they married in the late 1950s.  But after they began living together, Sylvia entering into the worst period of writer’s block in her life; baking endless cakes in a futile effort to stave off the maddening frustration.  Hughes, on the other hand, barricaded himself into a state of mental and emotional seclusion, isolating himself from Sylvia and his two children, and wrote like a maniac.  Plath would describe this as a time when she would sit in front of a typewriter and end up baking cakes, and Ted would go for a bike ride and come back with an epic.

Ted Hughes became Poet Laureate of Great Britain in the late 1980s and lived to a mellow old age by the time of his death in 1997.  The fact that he was named executor of Plath’s estate and had complete control of her literary works is interesting in and of itself.  If he was as instrumental in pushing her over the edge, as the movie would have us believe, why would she give her life to him?  When a husband abandons his wife for his work and partakes in routine adultery before her eyes, does the wife typically leave him all she has?

This seemingly curious chain of events is partially explained by what may have been the most significant line in the movie, which is presented as an actual quote of Plath’s.  Whether it is a real quote, or whether Paltrow’s excellent delivery just makes it seem real, I’ll never know.  But the fact is that she wrote little or nothing while she and Hughes were living together.  She only started to write (what became her best work) after she threw him out of the house.  Lucky for Hughes that she didn’t follow in Roxie Hart’s footsteps (“Chicago”-“He had it commin’!”).  She said that although she loved him completely, his leaving was like a weight lifted from her shoulders, and only after he was gone could she write again.  Surely Plath and Hughes set the gold standard in tortured relationships.

The release of this movie six years after Hughes’s death but thirty years after the story unfolded is not coincidence.  It would appear that Hughes arranged it that way.  Was that the way Sylvia wanted it, or did she simply leave the matter in his hands, along with the disposition of the rest of her life’s work?  The viewers will have to reach their own conclusions on that question.

If you like period movies about tortured artistic relationships you have probably already seen “Frida,” starring Salma Hayek as the great artist Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina as her ground-breaking, mural-painting and vow-breaking husband Diego Rivera.  Frida’s physical infirmities and her life of pain are the physical doppelganger of Plath’s mental illness.  Why did Frida have the strength to go on when Plath didn’t?  Spiritual strength, perhaps.

“Sylvia” is a good movie and a great performance by Paltrow, although I hate to see her triumph juxtaposed with the tragedy of suicide.  But then we are seeing a lot of suicide on the screen lately what with last year’s Oscar heavy-lifter “The Hours.”  If she has any failings at all in the movie, it’s just that she’s too beautiful throughout.  If only she would look a little more normal as her life becomes unbearable!  In any event, a fine movie well worth the watching, but don’t go see it when you need cheering up.