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Braving the wrath of Frieda Hughes to bring Sylvia to the screen
BY PETER KEOUGH
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An actress playing a doomed artist has a good shot at an Academy Award nod these days: Salma Hayek was nominated last year for Best Actress for Frida, and Nicole Kidman won the statuette after portraying Virginia Woolf in The Hours. So you might think that having Gwyneth Paltrow play Sylvia Plath — the poet, cult favorite, and feminist icon who committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 30 — would be a popular idea all around. It wasn’t. A powerful objection came from Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Plath and her estranged husband, future British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Frieda, who was two years old when her mother died, initially refused to let the makers of Sylvia (which has a screenplay by John Brownlow) use any of her mother’s poetry in the film. She also denounced the project as exploitative and even wrote a poem in which she described it as a "Sylvia Suicide Doll" marketed to "The peanut eaters, entertained/At my mother’s death. . . . " "I didn’t really deal with any of that," New Zealander Christine Jeffs, Sylvia’s director, says about the poetry ban. "I’m not pleading ignorant filmmaker, but I was making a movie, and sometimes there was more poetry and sometimes less depending on which way, legally, you went. It was a fluctuating situation." In the end, some of Plath’s poetry made it into the movie, including verses from her signature poem, "Lady Lazarus." But Frieda Hughes’s insistence that the film is exploitative still rankles Jeffs. "Well, I think Sylvia did put herself out into the world. She wanted artistic and commercial success, so you can look at the film as a celebration of her life or you can look at it as exploitation. Both arguments are valid, but it’s probably harder for the film to come out because it drags up so many intense emotions, and because the characters are reborn when actors physically embody them. I think that this is Sylvia’s work, and that she wanted it there in the world. And there’s a whole lot of work about her, which is kind of an industry that includes biographies, books, and so on — the film is part of that body of interest in her. It’s just a more intense experience because it is dramatized." Legal wranglings aside, Jeffs struggled with the more immediate challenge of representing on the screen such subjective experiences as mental pain and poetic inspiration. "My resource for making it was Sylvia’s own work, reading her journals and her poetry. And Gwyneth as well, in terms of her trying to get inspiration from within herself. [Paltrow had suffered the loss of her father just prior to the shooting.] I just tried to be truthful about the emotions. "I think her mental depression or instability was part of her, but it wasn’t all of her. I dealt with it in a narrative, the structure of the film. It’s indicated right at the beginning with the ‘Lady Lazarus’ poem that she has flirted with death so you know that she has a dark side. She wasn’t just depressed because of Ted [who was having an adulterous affair at the time of her death], but she carried those feelings at different times of her life." Like a poet herself, Jeffs, whose first film, Rain, was acclaimed for its imagery, tried to find the concrete detail, the "objective correlative" as T.S. Eliot described it, to express the inner state. "I found things that personally worked for me. Like when the ambulance pulls away at the end and you’re looking down at the red blanket and it looks like a wound on the white snow. Sylvia was really into details, and for me personally I feel like those images — they’re not really metaphorical, I don’t know what they do, but they do something." Sylvia opens next Friday, October 24, at theaters to be announced.
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