if God were interested in close textual analysis: a review of "Sylvia"
by Grace Lovelace
"Sylvia" is not a great film, but Gwyneth Paltrow is kind of
great in it. There is a leaden, predictable quality to the courtship and
honeymoon scenes which open the film. Take heart: the picture picks up
as Sylvia comes into her depression and jealousy while teaching at Smith.
When I heard about the casting of Paltrow as Plath, I thought it made
sense for her early, glamour girl years; suprisingly, Gwyneth is most
devastating in the long brown braids and tweeds of the Devon period, and
after the dissolution of the marriage, forget about it. By turns sarcastic,
desolate, visionary--all thequalities of the poetry--I knew I was watching
Gwyneth but at times had an uncanny sense of glimpsing Sylvia.
I don't want to exaggerate the virtues of the film, however: the filmmakers
(writer John Brownlow and director Christine Jeffs), apparently
in the interest of compression and clarity, are consistently flat-footed
and obvious. Those familiar with the story will probably find themselves
repeatedly irritated at alterations, all of which tend towards the bland.
In just one example, Aurelia Plath, who played such a rich role in Plath's
life and marriage (She was present at both their wedding and the discovery,
by Sylvia, of Ted's affair) is reduced to one ceremonial scene early on.
Blythe Danner brings such a complex presence to her short appearance,
I longed to see what she could do with a meatier Aurelia. While certainly
understandable for the sake of economy, the overall effect of these repeated
ommission is to lose the specificity of the story. It doesn't help that
because of legal reasons, not much of the poetry seeps into the film.
There is something sort of illicit about the enjoyment of this film (filmed
with full disapproval by their daughter Frieda); I for one felt a bit
queasy viewing the close-up on the bleating babies after the discovery
of the body.
Though much of the structure of Sylvia seems drawn from Birthday Letters,
Ted Hughes remains opaque throughout. Physically, Daniel Craig is a powerful,
seemingly Hughes-like presence, but this is Gwyneth's film. Oddly undifferenciated,
Hughes is loving, solicitious, adulturous, gone. For a fleshed-out portrait
of Ted Hughes (and a much fuller treatment of the actual writing of Plath
and Hughes), I recommend the new book by Diana Middlebrook, Her Husband.
Almost unique among Plath/Hughes biographers, she is utterly uninterested
in apportioning blame; Why bother, she argues, when the marriage served
its purposes for both of them, and certainly for us, the literary customer.
Judicious, playful, detached but gleeful, this feels like God's eye-view
of the whole relationship, if God were interested in close textual analysis.
In one of his late poems about Plath (the subject of this one ostensibly
her horsemanship), Hughes writes:
When I jumped a fence you strangled me
One giddy moment, then fell off,
Flung yourself off and under my feet to trip me
And tripped me and lay dead. Over in a flash.
Rest assured, all this new material is enough to keep us Plathoholics
tripping for a long time to come.
*
Grace Lovelace is the author of Diving into the Wreck: Female Narratives
of Self-Discovery. She lives in Los Angeles.
