This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It's 1956 Cambridge, England. American student Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) is dismissed by the high-minded poetry review. She is taken with fellow student Edward Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig)'s poems. They eventually get married. He has many female fans and she suspects his infidelity. They have two children. She struggles to write under successful Ted's overwhelming shadow. She falls into depression and eventually commits suicide in 1963.It's a downbeat biopic that bothers on old-fashion melodrama. Paltrow is lovely but I figured Plath would be more fragile even before her breakdown. Daniel Craig has the prerequisite charisma. The movie is very flat. It is unable to elevate the material into something more dramatic. This is a long drawn out character study that isn't terribly interesting.

The life of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was a complicated relationship. They were both poets. Sylvia was far more brilliant but totally tortured by her own inner demons. Perhaps, she would have been treated today for mental illness with counseling and medication. Sadly, Sylvia's suicide is fact and not fiction. She was still brilliant and promising but tortured by her inner demons of jealousy about her husband. Perhaps she had postpartum depression as well. Gwyneth Paltrow's performance of Sylvia Plath is a solid performance but it's weakened by poor writing. Daniel Craig does very well in playing her husband. I do enjoy seeing Blythe Danner in playing Sylvia's mother. Poetry is perhaps the most difficult of all writing and takes various forms. It's not surprising that Sylvia Plath had done her finest work solo but she was a gentle soul. I enjoyed seeing Sir Michael Gambon as her landlord. Like I wrote, I felt better improved writing could have helped turn this film into an Academy Award nominated performance by Gwyneth Paltrow. Also, the film was shot on location in New Zealand rather than England or America.

Gwyneth Paltrow is reported to have said that she was extremely unhappy with her performance in this film and cited her father's recent death for her inability to focus. She shouldn't have been so hard on herself as her acting in this film is a tour de force. It is even conceivable that the grief that she was feeling for her father gave her performance that poignancy and edge the part required.When you consider all the frivolous and trivial films that Paltrow has made down the years - including that ridiculous Oscar-winning role - her portrayal of the tragic Plath came as affirmation that she really was more than just eye candy. The film was well balanced and not unduly critical of Ted Hughes, a figure still much-vilified by the feminist lobby as being responsible for Sylvia Plath's mental disintegration and death.Daniel Craig's striking similarity to Hughes adds that extra something to his fine performance. One was left with the impression that if their paths hadn't crossed their lives would not have changed perceptibly.Plath was damaged long before she met Hughes, and Hughes? When was a handsome poet not the subject of scandal? A period gem that probably suffered commercially for acquiring an 'art house' tag, but a must see even if you are not into modern literary characters.

"Sylvia" splices and smudges with the sugary fingers of a binging college girl attempting to finish a presentation overnight. There's a distracted fluster about it, a wasteful, listless quality that seems to flick away its own subjects disinterestedly, like flies. The film appears to have been filmed under the cataract of a glazed cosmological eye by a director ailing with some chronic and/or terminal illness that makes her too exhausted to come to work much, much less care about any work she does manage to get done.Right from the get go, people and situations are veritably hurled at us without recourse, pretense, or explanation. Never are characters allowed to develop and establish a basis for their actions, which in themselves are not even given enough time to become subsequent. Gwyneth Paltrow's shrill Plath & Daniel Craig's listless Hughes have all the chemistry of two plates, and the edgy contempt that permeates their affair from the get go dashes their "marriage of true minds" myth to bitters on the rocks. Never, even in the beginning, do the two display any real tenderness towards each other, and never is the important historical union of their dual artistry illuminated. Thus, not being convinced of their love...nor, more importantly, of Plath's intense vulnerability...we cannot, of necessity, mourn its or her final disintegration. Director Christine Jeffs does not even succeed in making Plath an unlikable character...her Sylvia is too embarrassingly one dimensional to be anything but "flat, ridiculous, a cut paper shadow..." though she devotes a good deal of time to perpetuating the image of the poet that appeared in Anne Stevenson's notoriously biased biography "Bitter Fame".It is very difficult to imagine a movie that downplays with more tactical error the genius and dimensionality of its subject. The film boasts one of the frankly worst screenplays ever penned…much of the dialog is downright tacky, right out of its own Saturday Night Live parody (see the scene where Plath gushes, like a glazed Pollyanna, "I reeeally think God is speaking through me!") Finally, the movie poster for the film is significant in itself. As Sylvia Plath (flanked by the mortifyingly tasteless tagline, "Life Was Too Small Too Contain Her") Gwyneth Paltrow's eyes are so blue they seem almost colorized...stunning; the focus of the picture. Plath's brown eyes have been alluded to in memoirs, in Hughes' poems, and her own journals, and can be seen in photographs of her. A petty detail, so say some...but it's not. By not even bothering to outfit the star of the show with a friggin pair of color contacts, Jeffs is telling us that her film is going to be as she likes it; that attention to the life and death of a very real, very public figure is only incidental...and secondary...to artistic license. The problem is, this isn't true; and so we can only shake our heads and mutter, like Voltaire, "one owes respect to the living; to the dead only truth."