Sylvia
Directed by Christine Jeffs
Written by John Brownlow
With Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig
Now showing nationally.
REVIEW BY JESS MELVIN
If Sylvia Plath was a death-glorifying, dull, domesticated homeworker whose suicide epitomised her life, then the new film Sylvia is truly a wonderful representation.
Unfortunately for the film makers, it doesn't take much more than a quick reading of her poetry and fiction to realise that Plath is desperately trying to get across quite the opposite message. Not that viewers of Sylvia are given this opportunity. Frieda Plath banned the film from using any of her mother's poetry, arguing that the film was just another attempt to sell the "Sylvia suicide doll" that her mother had publicly become.
This did not faze the producers — who don't seem to have wanted facts to get in the way of good sensationalism anyway. The BBC has followed Hollywood's example, proving every human experience can be transformed into the same timeless girl-meets-boy love story. Sylvia's only diversion from this is that at the end of the film, our leading lady gets to stick her head in her gas oven.
After all, if sex sells, suicide does better.
The result is that not only is Sylvia tediously boring and unoriginal, it is also utterly offensive — for while Plath may have been many things, she was never short of words.
Plath, as the epilogue tells us, was one of last century's most widely read and celebrated poets. She was the first person to receive the Booker Prize for poetry posthumously — for Ariel, a collection of poetry she wrote during the time covered by the film.
After watching the film, you would be excused for wondering how she did this in between cooking cakes for her poet husband Ted Hughes (played by Daniel Craig), tearing up his poetry, arguing with him about his latest affair and falling into deep and paralysing depression.
Gwyneth Paltrow's Plath is pathetic and childlike. She appears submerged in her relationship with Hughes. While the film portrays this relationship as oppressive and stifling of her talent, the film's Plath appears unaware of it. The real Plath, however, strikes out in her poetry. In her 1962 poem "The Applicant", Plath satirises the institution of marriage:
Here is a hand
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do what ever you tell it
Will you marry it?
A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it?
Plath never shows such insight in the film. While in one scene she confesses that after her separation, she "has never been more free", this liberation is shown to be fleeting, so fragile it comes crashing down the moment Hughes arrives to hand the children Christmas presents. After this, Plath appears to deteriorate so dramatically that it would seem that all that was left of the life of Sylvia Plath was begging for Hughes to return, and her death.
Yet Plath wrote the bulk of her most acclaimed poetry in this period. She was on the panel of the BBC radio program The Critics, which drew an audience of more than 2 million people.
It is frustrating to have to argue that Sylvia Plath was a separate identity to her husband, particularly in a review of a self-proclaimed biopic. It is unthinkable that a film about Ted Hughes could be treated in a similar way.
Equally offensive is the film's ahistoric treatment of the sources of the death and violence in Plath's poetry. "Plath seems like a brilliant prodigy, an extraordinary and tragic freak", argues Philip Hensher in the February 1 Agenda in a review of Sylvia, in relation to the source of Plath's inspiration. "It is hard not to think", Hensher continues, "that she talked herself into the state of emotional extremity she wanted to dramatise."
Many images in Plath's poetry, however, relate to the horrors of fascism and the total disrespect for life and humanity of World War Two, as the world's imperialist powers clambered over themselves in the search for new power and profit.
Plath's ability to reflect such themes in a deeply personal way is amazing. She cut deep literary ground in a society in which old rules had been broken but new ones not yet written.
She lashes out against lack of freedom, women's oppression and the sensationalisation of death, using sarcasm and irony. Suicide is an alternative to unbearable suffering. Some of Plath's characters thus experience death in order to feel more alive.
In "Lady Lazarus", for example, a woman's suicide attempt is dehumanised by a huge, fascinated audience. Lady Lazarus' reaction to the audience, however, is defiant, cynical and deploring:
So, so Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable, The pure gold baby...
As, ash—
you poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there
A cake of soap,
a wedding ring, a gold filling.
Herr god, Herr lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Lady Lazarus is not after obliteration. Through ritualised death she wants to rise, to live. Lady Lazarus is asking us to hang on to our humanity. This is an understanding that Sylvia does not convey.
Sylvia has turned Plath's life into nothing more than empty sensationalised entertainment. The film's producers have brought her back to life simply to kill her again in the sideshow of the entertainment industry. Thankfully, Plath's own words are the most pertinent on the subject; and out of the ashes her poetry will continue to rise.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 25, 2004.
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