The story of a tortured genius that gives us plenty of the torture but very little of the genius...an unremitting two-hour dirge.
Sylvia (2003)
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Reviews Counted:124
Fresh:45
Rotten:79
Average Rating:5.3/10
Consensus: This biopic about Sylvia Plath doesn't rise above the level of highbrow melodrama.
Theatrical Release:30-01-2004
Synopsis: Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow stars in Sylvia as legendary American author and poet Sylvia Plath, opposite Daniel Craig as British Poet Laureate Edward (Ted) Hughes. Sylvia explores the... Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow stars in Sylvia as legendary American author and poet Sylvia Plath, opposite Daniel Craig as British Poet Laureate Edward (Ted) Hughes. Sylvia explores the source of creative genius, and love in all its passions. Ted and Sylvia were a sensual, volatile, and brilliant married couple who emerged as two of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The film begins in 1956. Sylvia is in England on a Fulbright Scholarship when she meets Ted. The attraction is immediate and mutual. It is a meeting not only of the minds, but of an intense physicality as well. Within four months, they are married. When her studies are completed, Sylvia is offered a teaching post back in America. She accepts, and the couple relocates. A working wife, Sylvia must also tend to her unique voice or risk losing it. The newly published Ted attracts the attention of the literary world, along with the attentions of admiring women. Retuning to England in the late 1959, Sylvia and Ted attempt to renew their commitment, first with the birth of one child and then another. But as the marriage frays anew and Ted's literary stature overshadows her own, Sylvia's creative impulses surge. She funnels her fury and passion into her work, and her writing begins to flow forth in unstoppable bursts. "I really reel like God is speaking through me," she exults. Her destiny -- and Ted's, inextricably intertwined with hers -- is at hand... -- © Focus Features [More]
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner, Michael Gambon
Director: Christine Jeffs
Director: Christine Jeffs
Screenwriter: John Brownlow
Producer: Alison Owen
Composer: Gabriel Yared
Studio: Focus Features
Reviews for Sylvia
Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig attach a handsome chemistry to their burgeoning despair.
Plath was one of the most-admired female poets of the 20th century, and one of the few to receive a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, but you won't find out why here.
...by the time the movie ends, we don't really feel as though we know what made her tick.
Adds precisely nothing of breaking-news value to the Plath-Hughes annals.
Likely to be equally displeasing to Plath enthusiasts as it will be to neophytes, Sylvia suffers from a strange timidity: It only gets close to its subject by rendering her as a kind of melodramatic archetype.
If melancholy moodscapes and witty abrasion could make a film portrait deep, Sylvia might deliver.
Sylvia delves into the tawdry details, which give the movie all the power of ... a daytime soap.
The film does what poets so seldom do themselves -- pursue the middle road and leave the path of excess to the less level-headed.
[Sylvia] is reminiscent of a tastefully illustrated picture book. It re-creates, often exquisitely and movingly, but without shedding any new light on the life and death of the most celebrated female American poet of the 20th century.
For those who have read the poets and are curious about their lives, Sylvia provides illustrations for the biographies we carry in our minds.
Christine Jeffs' timid direction and screenwriter John Brownlow's flimsy script set up each scene so that it only telegraphs the next; no single scene ever comes to life on its own terms.
Gwyneth delivers a surface performance - she goes through the motions with the right expressions, exuding the proper emotions, but you don't get any depth to her feelings.
Latest News for Sylvia
October 14, 2005:
It's Official: Daniel Craig is 007
ComingSoon.net shares with us the long-in-coming announcement, and it's one that shouldn't stun any of the astute movie geeks: British actor Daniel Craig has been signed to play... More...
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