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SylviaRating:
Release Date: 10 February, 2004 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (9 total) |
Sylvia Reviews
A bad production!
Sylvia Plath has got to be one of the more depressing souls imaginable according to this movie. There is some discussion of a previous suicide attempt, but no reasons for her behavior were discussed. One can only assume that she had a bi-polar personality, but perhaps it was something else.
There should have been more depth to the characters in the movie.
Paltrow went way overboard, in my opinion, in a classic example of overacting in practically every scene. On top of that, the music was so loud most of the time that the dialog could not be heard above the din.
A bad production, and a poor screenplay. Don't waste your time on this one.
Distinctly lacking a sense of Sylvia...
The fudemental truth about Sylvia Plath was that her life almost constantly balanced between creation and destruction. Paltrow gets a sense of this across but only to the degree that we see how this ingrained trait destroyed her relationship with Hughes and ultimatey her. Paltrow gives a credible performance as I feel the sense of lacking derives from a "phase" focussed script, that is that the script looks solely at the struggles of the Hughes/Plath relationship and their need to both achieve in the literary world and steer a smooth personal course which gave both what they needed. The film pays lip service to Sylvia's sense of early loss and the damage this inflicted on her adult personality, which in my estimation, left her feeling half a soul and half a bleak and empty vessel filled only with pain and pointlessness. In this sense the potrayal, intense as it is, displays a woman who is desperately needy and at times intensely irritating and fickle, for no apparant reason.
A woman who seemingly sows the seeds of her own destruction, with little sense of the root of her desperate and highly damaged sense of self, to add this dimension would have done Plath more credit.
The portayal from script, of Hughes is infinitely more sympathetic and one feels a truer sense of his attempt to provide Plath with all she her needs, and the growing realisation that this is impossible and that he will fall foul of her focussed destruction and seemingly powerless to change it, it seems here his affair was almost inevitable. An interesting point which would have displayed the toxicity of Plaths inner most destruction is that the woman Hughes left her for killed herself and her daughter just three years after Sylvia died.
As good as Paltrow is I could not help feel an older actress may have brought the sense of who and why Sylvia was rahter just give us a one dimesional portrayal of her destruction and creation. But I imagine her in lies the quandry since Plath was just 31 when she died so to give the role to say a Meryl Streep just would not work chronologically. Craig's performance was the better of the two for me, so intensley studied as to get both the accent and sound of Hughes absolutely perfect.
A worthy attempt all round, nonetheless, to convey some of what was an enormously interesting and tortured life.
More Customer Reviews (32 total)
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