Sylvia: Critic Reviews

This is the richest role Paltrow has had since Shakespeare in Love, and she rises to the challenge.

It is Plath's writing that represents ... her surest claim on our attention. The makers of Sylvia may, to some degree, have neglected this brilliant, unsettling and tragically foreshortened body of work, but they have not betrayed it.

The lead performances lift the film above melodrama, but they also expose the glaring holes in the screenplay.

Adds precisely nothing of breaking-news value to the Plath-Hughes annals.

For all the actors' ability, Sylvia never develops a pulse.

The results are mixed, but noble.

Ridden with the ankle-spraining lawn divots of the biopic.

Paltrow does this role exceptionally well, but it is underwritten.

By choosing to make Hughes neither a monster nor sympathetic, the film likely will disappoint Plath acolytes while at the same time falling shy of being a revisionist interpretation of their relationship.

Sylvia's emotional moods should swing from red-hot passion to icy rage. Instead, the movie runs the gamut from tepid to lukewarm.

Odd that a story of two such hot-burning lives as Plath and Hughes could leave us so cold.

For those who have read the poets and are curious about their lives, Sylvia provides illustrations for the biographies we carry in our minds.

It's a dreary movie about a dreary character, offering little insight into her poetry or the mental illness that ultimately conquered her.

Cinema and poetry aren't merely disparate art forms but largely incompatible ones.

So suffocating, so lugubrious is the film that Sylvia didn't need to gas herself to death. Jeffs deprives her of oxygen.

No one expects this to be the feel-good show of the year, but Jeffs' approach is so maudlin that by the end, Plath won't be the only one who's depressed.

Paltrow successfully transmits Plath's mental distress and her desperation to shake off a mounting depression.

Offers a wondrously illuminating artistic experience for its ideal audience -- people like me who know a little but not much about the explosive Plath-Hughes fusion of unbridled poetic temperaments in a tauntingly prosaic world.

Paltrow is clearly committed to plumbing the depths of Plath's suffering, but this frigid and inaccessible period piece wears its glumness like a shroud.

A prestige picture that doesn't have a lot going for it beyond its serious intentions.

Likely to be equally displeasing to Plath enthusiasts as it will be to neophytes, Sylvia suffers from a strange timidity: It only gets close to its subject by rendering her as a kind of melodramatic archetype.

The film does what poets so seldom do themselves -- pursue the middle road and leave the path of excess to the less level-headed.

It's a little surprising that Sylvia is so conventional, considering that Plath, whatever you think of her work or her life story, openly defied plenty of the '50s conventions.

It's Bleak Chic.