Buy it... if you regularly enjoy Gabriel Yared's consistently pleasant, harmonious, and somber underscores for moderate orchestral ensembles and solo piano.

Avoid it... if you have no interest in sinking your spirits with a dreary piece of music for a dreary movie about a dreary character.

Yared

Sylvia: (Gabriel Yared) If not for the use of arthouse venues to generate awards hopes, one really has to wonder why films like this get the green light, especially when every educated person entering the theatre knows that they will be disturbed and saddened when leaving it. The film is a true, biographical depiction of the marriage between American poet/novelist Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) and English poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig). Anyone knowledgeable about this most famous literary pairing of the 20th Century is familiar with the glorious beginning to their partnership as well as their unceremonious end. In short, after a passionate but rocky marriage, Hughes leaves Plath (who was quite neurotic to begin with) for another woman, and Plath successfully kills herself by sticking her head in a gas oven, leaving her brilliant writings and two children behind. Hughes would live another 35 years after the 1963 suicide of Plath, and he would largely be blamed for her death over the course of his own successful writing career. The film accurately follows the glum truths of Plath and Hughes' co-existence between 1956 and 1963, painfully drawing out the psychological ecstasy and devastation during lengthy sequences without dialogue. Critics hailed the film's attention to the topic (a film about Plath and Hughes was likely inevitable), but the inherently dreary nature of the story, with no redeeming grace, caused mixed audience reactions to the overall project. The intention of the film was likely to build upon the dramatic success of The Hours the previous year, a film in which another famous female author takes her life. When considering a composer for Sylvia, it would be safe to say that either Philip Glass or Gabriel Yared could provide a sufficiently classical score for the emotionally distraught illustrations. The difference between Glass and Yared, though, is that Yared seemed better equipped to convey the simple, flowing romanticism of the passionate side of the story without being inclined to convey his ideas in artistically rhythmic devices. Some mentioned at the time that Jan A. P. Kaczmarek's subtle melodrama may have been a good match for Sylvia, too. Interestingly, Yared's score for the film would package his own sensibilities with a few stylistic similarities to both Glass and Kaczmarek's mannerisms.

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Along similar lines, Gabriel Yared composed the Academy Award-winning score for The English Patient several years prior to Sylvia. Both scores exhibit a morbid sense of drama, skillfully extending the inevitable personal destruction playing out on screen. The music for Sylvia, however, doesn't feature the same broad scope of orchestral depth, remaining close to the characters through the use of a collection of personal, solo performances set over pleasant, though underdeveloped orchestral backing. Among those featured are performers on cello, oboe, clarinet, cor anglais, and Yared himself on the piano. Typically, these performers operate with simple themes and motifs that contain meandering chord progressions of harmonious, but generally uninteresting progressions. The title theme is so elongated that it comfortably nestles in with this material without much notice. The rhythms of "The Cows" and the piano of "The Star" are reminiscent of Glass and Kaczmarek, respectively. The 1950's era of the tale does come to life in the same stark, realistic way that Elmer Bernstein was able to generate in Far From Heaven the previous year as well. This page taken from simpler days grows ominous in "Seeds of Doubt" and intensifies through "Fire" with heavily quivering and screeching strings. Yared doesn't follow too obvious a predictable path with Sylvia, though, because as Plath is preparing and succeeding in killing herself, the score regresses back to just a solo piano. The attitude conveyed throughout the score is perhaps a touch noble, but the most surprising aspect of Sylvia is Yared's choice (perhaps directed to him) to keep the highs and lows of the film's emotions absent from the score. The overall affect of the music, therefore, is one of a consistently dapper mood, and while the more frightening emotional moments do feature some intense string work, the more passionate side of the story (in the first half of the score) seems somewhat lost. The music for "First Meeting" is especially curious in its lack of romantic spark. Thus, the score becomes a dreary piece of music for a dreary movie about a dreary character. As a 45-minute listening experience, it ranks about average in Yared's collection of works, but if you're at all familiar with the horrific display of human failures in the story, then the album for Sylvia could be just as depressing as the film itself. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Gabriel Yared reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.11 (in 10 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.29 (in 17,992 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.