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Sylvia (2003)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:33
Fresh:9
Rotten:24
Average Rating:5.3/10
Consensus: This biopic about Sylvia Plath doesn't rise above the level of highbrow melodrama.
Theatrical Release:Oct 17, 2003 Limited
Box Office: $1,235,406
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
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Reviews for Sylvia
Cinema and poetry aren't merely disparate art forms but largely incompatible ones.
By choosing to make Hughes neither a monster nor sympathetic, the film likely will disappoint Plath acolytes while at the same time falling shy of being a revisionist interpretation of their relationship.
An often painful, surprisingly illuminating and emotionally complex portrait of a woman who is ultimately as mysterious as her art.
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.
The film does what poets so seldom do themselves -- pursue the middle road and leave the path of excess to the less level-headed.
For those who have read the poets and are curious about their lives, Sylvia provides illustrations for the biographies we carry in our minds.
Odd that a story of two such hot-burning lives as Plath and Hughes could leave us so cold.
Offers a wondrously illuminating artistic experience for its ideal audience -- people like me who know a little but not much about the explosive Plath-Hughes fusion of unbridled poetic temperaments in a tauntingly prosaic world.
Paltrow successfully transmits Plath's mental distress and her desperation to shake off a mounting depression.
So suffocating, so lugubrious is the film that Sylvia didn't need to gas herself to death. Jeffs deprives her of oxygen.
No one expects this to be the feel-good show of the year, but Jeffs' approach is so maudlin that by the end, Plath won't be the only one who's depressed.
Latest News for Sylvia
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