Cinema review: Slyvia (15) (From Barry And District News)

Cinema review: Slyvia (15)

Life and death of poetic duo

THE opening line from this film comes from the American writer Sylvia Plath's poem Lady Lazarus: 'Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell'.

Over the years since she committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 30, her followers have revered her and demonised her English husband Ted Hughes. But it is only fair to remember she first tried to kill herself long before she met him. There is also little doubt that she was very strange and had a morbid fascination with death.

During his life, Hughes kept his counsel about their time together, but after she died he wrote Birth-day Letters, a poetry book about their tormented relationship, which wasn't published until after his own death from cancer in 1998.

So for 35 years he had to live with constant vilification from many people, not that he helped the situation by burning one of her journals after she died, saying he didn't want their children to read it. People took this to mean he had something to hide. Hughes' second wife killed herself as well, so, though Sylvia was very difficult to live with, I think it is fair to say he wasn't easy either.

It's sad that Sylvia only really became famous after her death, when her last book of poems Ariel, and her novel The Bell Jar were published.

Early on in her life, her poems were rejected 45 times. One critic said her work was "bourgeois and nakedly ambitious," but she won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously.

Having won the Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge, Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) heads for England in 1956.

Her first meeting with Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) is at a university dance and they are instantly smitten. She calls him "the black marauder" and after only a couple of hours they kiss passionately.

During the evening she also famously bites his cheek, making it bleed. Undeterred, he takes one of her earrings and later on after a session reciting passages of Shakespeare to each other, they end up in bed together. They marry and go back to her home state of Massachusetts, where they both make a living teaching.

Sylvia's domineering but sympathetic mother Aurelia (Blythe Danner), knowing her tricky, fragile daughter well, is sure Hughes is wrong for her. She tells him: "She likes you because you're dangerous." She also tells him about Sylvia's previous suicide attempt and warns him she is more than likely to succeed at some time.

It is not long before Sylvia's paranoia comes to the fore. She suffers from writer's block and her husband's magnetic attraction to the fairer sex makes her frantically jealous. She also begrudges his new-found fame. They move to London, produce two children and settle in Devon.

Despite Hughes' wandering eye, he really loves Sylvia, but she can never resist making a fool of herself and is always just a step away from pressing the self-destruct button. At one dinner party, when Hughes is harmlessly talking to a female guest, whose partner is also there, Sylvia whinges, "Why do you humiliate me so?" Eventually he does, with her friend Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), who is soon pregnant with his baby.

It is such a tragedy that in the 50s and 60s the world was still remarkably ignorant about mental illness, or something might have been done to help her.

On February 11, 1963, her depression got the better of her, and leaving her children bread and milk, she sealed their room to protect them from gas fumes and put her head in the oven.

Paltrow masterfully underplays her madness and looks uncannily like Plath. I particularly liked her Anglo-American accent, although I have no idea whether Plath did talk like that.

Her performance is mesmerising, vivid and sad, as the character's mood swings from lively to depressed.

Though Craig is good - there is a sort of craggy animal magnetism about him which is easy to relate to - there is little electricity between them. The scenes with Danner, Paltrow's real mother, are excellent, especially when she is confronting Hughes.

But it is Plath's tortured state that is so superbly re-enacted here. One almost feels intrusive to watch it unfold. Powerful stuff, but not a jolly night out.