At the Lighthouse

I just watched this movie for the first time since I first saw it back when it was in the theatres. At the time I was reluctant to go see because I always liked Sylvia Plath a lot, and I didn’t feel up to watching some blockbuster version of The Bell Jar. But I was pleasantly surprised back then (especially when I found out that the plot was not based on The Bell Jar) and actually liked the movie better than most of the critics, if I recall correctly.

Movie still from Sylvia

Upon rewatching it now, I still think it’s good, even if I’m a little less enthusiastic about it.

Daniel Craig has the right looks for Ted Hughes (they’ve given him a dark wig to make him resemble the brunette poet), but I’m not as big a fan of Daniel Craig as so many other seem to be these days, and I get somewhat irritated with his blank expression, which he uses all the time and which I guess is supposed to signify… a laconic personality or something to that effect, and it’s probably wrong of me to dismiss it as lazy acting, but that’s what I do, and it annoys me.

Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes

Gwyneth Paltrow is Sylvia Plath, and she’s good, I think. At the beginning, in Cambridge, she wavers a little unmusically between being loud and shrill and overdramatically Quiet and Deep, but then again, I’ve read Sylvia Plath’s published letters and Plath did seem to have a tendency to be that way, so I guess it’s alright. In any case, Paltrow does a great job with the more mature Plath towards the ending of the movie, and I think her depiction of Plath’s depression closing in on her is really moving.

On a more superficial level; I’m not sure I understand why she’s a blonde. Sylvia Plath did dye her hair platin-blond at one point in her life, but I think that was before this movie takes place, and only for a brief period of time. It’s no big deal, and otherwise I think Paltrow, a gangling beauty, matches Plath’s appearance well, but it does seem a little strange, since a brown hair-dye could have taken care of things easily. Oh, well.

Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath

Then there’s the problem of copyright and the use of Plath’s poems in the movie. Or lack thereof. As I understand it, Frieda Hughes resented the idea of a movie based on her parents’ unhappy marriage and wouldn’t let the writers include her mother’s poems in the script. I fully understand this, I would probably feel the same way, but it does subtract from the quality of the movie a great deal. Here’s the story of two poets, involved in a relationship that allegedly inspired both of them immensely, and yet we never get to hear their work. The inclusion of full poems (instead of just half verses thrown in here and there in what must have been a tip-toe dance around Frieda Hughes’s prohibition) could have served to make the movie into more than just a tragic love flick.

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

A particularly cringeworthy attempt at using Plath’s work without really using it is the voice-over at the very beginning, which I really, really hate. Plath has a passage in The Bell Jar where she compares her life to a fig tree. She imagines herself sitting underneath a fig tree and each of the figs represents possible choices for her to make in her life: One is the husband she would marry and the children she would have, one is a career as a professor, one is her becoming a poet etc. etc. As she sits there, desperately hungry, trying to choose which fig to eat, the figs grow rotten and fall down all around. A great image, and I can see why the writers of Sylvia would want to use this; it does have relevance for this movie that depicts Sylvia as a torn, unhappy person and a wasted potential. But of course the writers couldn’t use the passage because of the prohibition, so what did they do? They rewrote it. And poorly so. In their version, the tree’s branches each represent a life-choice for Sylvia, and while that seems an ok, if somewhat cliched metaphor (branches=careers), the allegory just doesn’t make sense. It continues: “And as I sit there trying to choose, the leaves begin to turn brown and blow away (…)”.

…. Choose? Whaa-? Between what? When does one ever choose between leaves anyway? It seems almost blasphemic to impose on Sylvia Plath such a poor imagery.

But poor imagery or not, however, the art director makes the most of it. The opening shot with an autumn-leaved tree is very pretty, and for the rest of the movie, autumn colours creep gloomily into every scene, even the summer ones. I love the scene where Ted and Sylvia have gone out rowing in a rowboat during their summer vacation in America. It’s summer, they’ve gone out to enjoy themselves, but an autumn-like wind sweeps over the bay, and it looks cold and contrasts the blue sky, and it takes the couple way out into open sea where they almost perish. This autumn atmosphere in the aesthetics of the movie builds up nicely to the bleak winter scenery at the end, the snow swallowing up the landscape outside as Sylvia gives up hope and kills herself in February 1963.

The sceneries are beautifully backed up by composer Gabriel Yared’s soundtrack: A pretty, simple piano piece in minor key dominates the score, constantly threatened by the overpowering of accompanying dramatic strings. It serves as an almost epically musical interpretation of Sylvia’s tragedy.

So I think my final judgement is that this is a good film on the topic of depression and the hardship of true love. It’s just that I would have liked it to have been even more than that; I would have liked for it to have been about poetry. God help me, that’s what I expect when sitting down to watch a movie about a poet. And I think I would have liked a different actor for Ted Hughes’s part. And I’d still much rather read The Bell Jar, any day, for an artistic take on Plath’s biography.

PS: The child actors they’ve cast as Frieda and Nicholas Hughes are so cute they make my ovaries hurt. And the director gives us some very nice cameos of the children, making them appear as silent, wondering spectators more than anything else, which is just heartbreaking, considering how things turned out.

/marie