"Sylvia"

I will be presenting the movie Sylvia tomorrow in class, and I'll use this opportunity to organize my thoughts on the movie. The film tracks the life of Sylvia Plath from her days in college, through her marriage and separation with Ted Hughes, up until her suicide.  The film focuses mostly on the relationship between Ted and herself, with all of her writing being, seemingly, a response to Hughes' infidelity. 

I read some online reviews about the film. Most of the reviews described some sort of issue involving the absence of some aspect in the life of Sylvia Plath that the film did not touch upon, the writing processes of the two writers, the failure to portray Plath's relationship with her children, and so on. Every review that I encountered praised Gwyneth Paltrow for her performance and emotional depth. (An interesting note is that Paltrow's father had died very recently during the time that film began shooting, so the emotional anguish and grieving is thought to be directly inspired by her personal emotional turmoil at the time.)

The most compelling review that I read discussed the portrayal of the Ted and Sylvia's marriage and relationship. The criticism was that in the end, without having done any previous research on the life of Plath, the screenplay and film both lead the audience towards viewing Ted Hughes as the "injured party." Hughes' womanizing and infidelities are viewed as outlets that he was driven to as a result of Plath's jealous obsessions. With the movie focusing solely on their relationship, Daniel Craig's (Ted Hughes) portrayal robs the complexity of the high-strung and competitive relationship that the two shared biographically.