(2003) "Dying is an art." So is filmmaking when all of its elements are concinnous. While not as "beautiful … frightening … haunting" as her collection of poems, titled Colossus, director Christine Jeff's biopic of the tragic story of American poet Sylvia Path (Gwyneth Paltrow), from John Brownlow's screenplay, unfolds like a lyrical vers libre that degenerates, "like a crumbling moon," as she attempts to restructure her existence, into bleak verse.

On a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge in 1958, Sylvia (disappointed with a critical review of her poetry as "nakedly ambitious") meets up-and-coming English poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) after reading his "great, big, crashing poems" in the same British literary journal. In an early conversation between them, they exchange lines from the death scene in Romeo and Juliet. "Did you ever have something you wanted to erase?" she asks before telling him of her attempt at suicide three years earlier: "Lady Lazarus - that's me."

As they float down a stream in a boat, she recites to the cows from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath." Taking first prize (judged by W.H. Auden) for his book of poems, Hawk in the Rain, for which he's rewarded with publication, Ted marries Sylvia before they voyage to the US where she introduces him to her widowed but well-to-do mother Aurelia (Blythe Danner), who expresses concern for how they will make a living together as writers. Taking Ted aside, she informs him that Sylvia loves him because unlike anyone else he has frightened her: "Be good to her - always."

During the summer he composes poetry while she, to his disappointment, only bakes cakes. Happy until her father died when she was nine, Sylvia concedes, "I don't have a subject," willing to let her husband be the writer; but Ted insists she does: "It's you." With both of them taking jobs teaching, Sylvia suspects Ted of unfaithfulness with a female student; they return in 1960 to London where Sylvia has a baby girl.

Drawing the adulation of admirers, especially females, Ted largely leaves domestic chores and childrearing to Sylvia, whose own first published volume of poems captures the attention of critic Al Alvarez (Jared Harris), who remarks on the dark visions "out of the corner of her eye."

Following their move to Devon in 1962 and a second baby, the Plaths become acquainted with poets David (Andrew Havill) and Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), the latter with whom Ted has an affair. The movie leaves open the question as to whether Sylvia's paranoia pushed Ted toward Assia ("If you fear something enough, you can make it happen … I conjured her") or being especially perspicacious and intuitive she long before perceived this happening.

Leaving Devonshire and Ted behind, Sylvia takes the children with her back to London where she tells Alvarez: "Now he's gone, I'm free … God speaking through me." The poetry - "like a murderer's confession," the critic praises - pours from her wounded heart without anger, despair, or sympathy, along with her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. "Fiction," she sarcastically slammed Ted's excuses, "really isn't your gift."

Taking up smoking cigarettes and seeking a lover, she asks Alvarez: "What do you do when your life gets so bad as it can and it just keeps getting worse?" Alvarez begs her: "Don't throw it all away just because of an affair." On February 11th, 1963, feeling "hollow … negative of a person," she looks inside the "blackness and silence," beckoning with its mysterious and mesmerizing oblivion, unable to appreciate her own brilliant flame, and puts her head like one of her cakes into an unlit oven where her mind explodes.

Unfortunately, for a visual medium, this prosaic film relies too heavily on words and conventional narrative rather than attempting to startle with beautiful, frightening, haunting imagery.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .