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# Poetic justice absent for stars of ‘Sylvia’
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/poetic-justice-absent-for-stars-of-sylvia/
- Published: 2003-10-24T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T03:07:40.000Z
- Author: Dan Dunn
- Tags: Entertainment, Santa Monica, #archive-import

Surely the intense and ultimately tragic love affair between the celebrated poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was a lot more complex (and interesting) than the one the makers of the plodding biopic “Sylvia” conjured up. After all, before she took her own life in 1963 at the age of 30, Plath had written some of the most profound verse of the 20th Century, and the late Hughes — an eventual British poet laureate — was no slouch himself. But the passion that melded these two mythic figures together somehow eluded their celluloid counterparts — Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig — who struggle throughout this uneasy film to muster any chemistry. And while Paltrow does a creditable job with the heavy lifting necessary to play a suicidal manic-depressive poet, at times she pours the pathos on so heavy that it isn’t long before we feel as though we might drown in it. When the film reaches its inevitable conclusion, with Sylvia taking her own life, it induces relief rather than sadness.

The story of Sylvia and Ted, as synopsized by director Christine Jeffs (“Rain”) and documentarian-turned-screenwriter John Brownlow, goes like this: They met at a party in 1956 at Newnham College. She was on a Fulbright Scholarship, and he’d just launched a literary magazine. Four months into a whirlwind romance, they married and moved to New England, where she’d taken a job as a teacher. Ted published some poems, gained some notoriety — and the attention of the ladies — and Sylvia became jealous. They returned to England, had two kids, he had an affair and left her. While battling severe depression, she wrote the bulk of the material that would comprise her most famous collection of poems, “Ariel,” along with her only published novel, “The Bell Jar.” Shortly thereafter, she killed herself.

And while there could be no happy ending to “Sylvia,” the film might have been more appealing had Jeffs et al tempered the lugubriosity, eschewed some of the melodrama, and paid more attention to the artists’ journey. After all, Plath and Hughes wrote some pretty heady stuff, right? But we’re reduced to rubbernecking what amounts to speculative soap opera pap instead of exploring the complex evolution of their art. (Rated R for sexuality, nudity and language. Running time: 100 minutes)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 24, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/102403.pdf?ref=smdp.com)