Sylvia
Gwyneth Paltrow is an American in Cambridge as she plays the tortured poet Sylvia Plath in this very BBC movie from Christine Jeffs. This biopic is akin to Iris and The Hours, which both featured genius women protagonists: the link extends to Pollock which was about the abstract artist. What all such films seem to do is condense a person’s life and bring it to us in an entertaining package. Success remains elusive, especially when filmmakers use so many clichés: riding a bike through academic towns, running through sombre rain or peering melancholically into the swirling black ocean. Sylvia features many poetic jokes and quotes — including some Chaucer read properly! You can probably tell if this is up your alley or not.
Felix Staica
I personally found Gwyneth Paltrow quite distracting and oddly cast for such a serious and potential masterpiece of a role — although she did perform more convincingly than I’d have expected, given her other bland & cheesy roles and performances. Will we ever see her as the character portrayed instead of Miss Sookilala from such predictable films as Sliding Doors, Shakespeare in Love & Possession? On the other hand, I’m not overly familiar with Sylvia Plath or her works, apart from the knowledge of her obviously pained experiences/tormented state of mind and consequential stirring arts of articulation. Hence I had no expectations of how the film should be played out… yet still, somehow, I was disappointed. With so much more possible, the film still seemed to rely upon and follow clichés and stereotypes throughout *sigh*. As an IMDB reviewer posed, “I couldn’t help thinking, if only one of those DOGME people made this instead!” Perhaps Lars Von Trier… Wouldn’t we all be ready to join Sylvia in her plight for freedom from life then! This film only ever-so-shallowly ‘explains’ Sylvia Plath’s life & experiences, however if it did anything for me at all, it did inspire me (like many others of the audience no doubt) to read Ariel, Plath’s most significant collection of poems, ‘one of the most influential today’.
Tamara
