sylvia | the film

It took three separate viewings before I felt I could say anything about the film “Sylvia” starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes, and it was only after reading yet more biographies, both of Plath and Hughes that I felt I could comment with any authority.

The film is lukewarm at best, and though technically it gets many of the major details correct, what it lacks and what it does not show with any real authoritative voice is the passion that existed between the two and the real despair. Paltrow is somewhat believable as Plath, though an odd choice for the role, given her build; Plath herself was a big-boned girl, not fat or overweight, but large boned, and long in the bone and rather Teutonic in some ways, a real pin-up (which she actually did for a few silly articles while at Smith for which she posed in some cheesecake shots in a bathing suit). Paltrow is too watery to thin, though her performance is what carries this film through. Perhaps because Paltrow had, so recently before shooting began, lost her own father that she was able to plumb the depths and really get to the core of Plath’s serious depression and downward spirals. Her tears are convincing, and under the circumstances, one could believe, likely real. What’s more, Plath as we all know, had a real daddy thing, and that Paltrow had lost her own father would no doubt have helped her relate to such a trying role as Sylvia must have been.

As for the rest, Daniel Craig while he may look a bit like Hughes, but overall is too weak a character. His Yorkshire accent sounds authoritative enough, and perhaps in deed he is from there (this writer doesn’t know, but I was sold on that much anyway), but he lacks the physical presence that Hughes had; he is simply too small and not charismatic enough. He is dark and greasy and unkept and unwashed as Hughes himself often was, believing instead in the natural stink of his maleness to draw women to him (it seems to have worked, for Hughes could have and did have his pick, and he plucked them often, some would say too often.)

Craig is too lukewarm. Not strong or formidable. Remember, Ted was often named Ted Huge and for a reason. He was huge, in both affect and in size. Craig convinces the viewer of neither. Sylvia’s true “colossus” as she called him, was really a truly colossal man, much as her father, Otto Plath (of Bumblebees and their Ways) was also a colossal figure in Plath’s eyes; both were gods of some kind in her view.

The film moves quickly from first meeting at Cambridge where Plath was a Fullbright scholar, to the night of their consummation and confession after a night reading poetry aloud at a gathering in an all-male friend’s house of Hughes’s. That night, Plath tells Hughes of her first suicide attempt. How she crawled beneath the house after breaking into the lockbox with the sleeping pills and alsmot died. She is Lady Lazarus, she says to him, the risen dead.

As in life, the relationship between Hughes and Plath developed quickly, gathering intensity like a bonfire or fast moving storm. They speak of everything and see poems as “weapons”, like bombs they threaten to “go off at any time.” Paltrow/Plath cleverly says, “Imagine what would happen if a sonnet were to explode!” It is exactly the kind of clever banter that existed between the two in real life and has been documented by biographers time and time again, so much so ,that part of us cannot help but want a different story – the story behind the story that we know exists, because one’s life is not made up of large events. IN fact, it is usually the small stuff that counts the most and that hits us where we count.. That is what we remember of those who have passed, but not of those who we chose to mythologize as we have Plath and Hughes.

The film accurately portrays Plath subordinating herself somewhat to Ted – subordinating her work anyway – and putting her husband’s poetry ahead of her own, devoting her time to typing up manuscripts, sending them out for rejection rejection and final approval. This would be accurate for the time and one has to see this in context. It may seem mad to some women today, but back then, in the fifties and sixties, there were many women like Plath who felt that marriage necessitated the giving up of the old self to a rebirth of self that would emerge as the nurturing mother for both children and husband. It was her job to clean and cook and when possible, see to her husband’s career as well. Plath was not unusual in this and there is absolutely nothing strange about it – yet since her death, rabid groups of women have latched onto this fact as some evidence of Hughes’s awful power over Plath, and a power that he enforced at that. This is simply not true. Plath was a strong character herself and whatever she did with Ted , for the most part, she did so willingly and happily. Read Letters Home and yhou’ll see. Read her journal and you’ll see. The issue only became an issue when Hughes broke the deal that is tacit in such an arrangement and that is that he, in return, would be a good and loyal husband.

Hughes was never in many ways, cut out for marriage (though after Sylvia’s death, he married multiple times and note too, that Assia Weevill too took her life, taking with her their daughter, Shura.) But Hughes was always a flirt and somewhat of a scoundrel, but as the years went on and his star rose (with Sylvia’s help, for surely though Hughes had great talent, hhe did not have the talent of sending out the work, typing the manuscripts and getting them seen the way only Plath’s relentlessness would. She had the business savvy that he lacked and he used what she offered. His part of the deal, as noted, was to be respectful and faithful. In the film as in reality, Hughes fell fall short of this goal, and it began not long after they were married. Or perhaps continued would be a better word. On return from Benidorm, Spain, where the couple honeymooned, Hughes and Plath returned to teaching and she taught at Smith while Hughes read his poems for a few classes. During this time, we know of at least one woman of whom Plath was suspicious, though Ted could always be seen flirting with other women. AT least, it looks like flirting and whatever he may have called it, it was more than simply being “friendly.” He couldn’t help but fall to any woman who had some words of praise for him, and after he won prizes for his poetry, many women wanted to be with this colossus of a man, for his poetry was the stuff that made them swoon as he read it in his big and booming voice.

The film moves from the major events that we all know all too well; the first meeting at the St. Boltoph Party with the cheek-bite that draws blood, and Hah! I’ve got your earring blah blah scene closely followed by the two living together; the honeymoon in Benidorm; the Smith years; the return to England; the house at Court Green in Devon where the Hughes returned to after, fatefully, rented their London house to David and Assia Weevill. The real trouble began in earnest at that moment.

Things were not as they seemed when Assia and David showed up, as if by chance, to rent the couples apartment in London. Assia was already well aware of Sylvia’s work and even knew some of the same people and friends. She had read Sylvia’s first book, The Colossus, and had, by Jillian Becker’s account, even listened to their broadcasts on the BBC (which Sylvia and Ted had often done together for a Young Poets Series).

Disastrously, after renting out their London flat, Sylvia invites the Weevills to visit them in the country in Devon at Court Green and indeed, they do go. It would turn out to be the first nail in her own coffin. Hughes had already felt a visceral attraction to Assia’s darkness and foreign accent and style. She was so Other than Sylvia, the complete opposite and it is likely this that attracted Ted as much as anything.

Adding yet more to the story, Assia had set out that weekend to couple’s Devon house having told friends that she was off to “bag” Ted Hughes and went to Devon in her war paint. None of this though, is mentioned in the film. It is as if the couple meet, develop a mutual attraction (all true) but none of Assia’s intent is noted, and indeed, it is not noted in very many biographies of Plath as well. It is as if Plath had been somehow overreacting, picking up on something that didn’t exist, which isn’t true. The attraction did exist and it was strong. Nothing may have happened, but it soon would and Plath was no fool. She had seen her husband flirt and charm before, but even she knew this was different. Here was someone who spookily, wanted not only Plath’s husband, but in very many ways, was as much, if not more, obsessed with Sylvia as she was with Ted. For as much as Assia wanted to bag and bed Ted, she wanted to fuck Sylvia as well in some primal way.

To be fair, Plath had always had some fear of abandonment, since her father had passed away when she was nine and living in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Plath had already attempted suicide at least once with the sleeping pills and another time that she mentions briefly about walking out into the ocean, but it “spit her back out like a cork… I guess it didn’t want me.” A man like Hughes, already predisposed to some sort of infidelity was a poor choice. Yet it is likely that it was this very thing that attracted Plath to Hughes in the first place – his inability to be tamed, the way she had managed to tame and control. He was the only man, Aurelia, Plath’s mother played brilliantly by Blythe Danner (Paltrow’s real mother in life), was quoted as saying that “was not afraid of Sylvia.” and whom Sylvia was more afraid of.

One has seen this type of match time and time again, and if Hughes had perhaps understood his wife’s true fragility a little better, then perhaps things would have turned out differently and there would have been nothing to push her over the edge. That assumes that the affair is what pushed her over the edge. Certainly, it gave a helping hand, but it seems entirely possible that Plath may have done so anyway.

Given that the film, like most biographies, repeats the same tired events between the Plath-Hughes’s that we know all too well, this film is not a revelation or surprise. It is predictable, if reasonably well-acted, it still lacks any real insight or passion and ultimately, that is a let-down, and even our Gwyneth, who clearly put her all into the role and does succeed, cannot over a script that we are now deafened too for we’ve heard it just one too many times.

We have to ask ourselves, why is it that we are so comfortable with the myth of who Plath and Hughes were and not with the rest of the details that make up the reality. Why is that we must always punish Hughes and see Plath as the victim, or vice versa. Why is the truth not, where it usually can be found, somewhere in the middle.

At the end of the day, the real story can be found by reading Hughes’s book Birthday Letters and Plaths’s posthumously published Ariel side-by-side and page-for-page. They real like two communicating vessels, her final words, spoken before she stepped to the grave, and his response that comes too late to save her. It is a response worth hearing nonetheless and together, both tell the true tale of a couple that were always communicating, sending out signals like creates echolocating and pinging back and forth through the darkness.