by JOANNE LATIMER

Where would the annals of poetry gossip be without Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes? Was he a philanderer or did she drive him away? Sylvia, the biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, politely tiptoes through their marriage without fully answering this question. It's just as well, really. Director Christine Jeffs prefers to give us an oblique view of the passion, grievances, tenderness and resentments that make a marriage.

Sylvia is a tense and brooding film, as you'd imagine, and anyone unkindly disposed to beautiful, frustrated writers should stay away. The film starts in '56, when Plath was on a Fulbright scholarship in Cambridge. She meets the talented Hughes there and they're married in three months. Sylvia wears a red polka dot dress to the ceremony, signaling the shitstorm of trouble ahead. They return to America, so she can teach to pay the bills while Hughes goes about the business of being an up-and-coming poet. This set-up doesn't sit well with Plath, who is torn between adoring her husband and resenting his success. She copes by baking cakes. Self-loathing ensues.

Soon the children arrive; then the affairs. Plath is paranoid about Hughes' wandering eye and is driven to distraction with jealousy. She kicks Hughes out and finally starts to write in earnest. What a relief - for the audience, mostly, who start to feel the oppression of their airless and fraught relationship.

Sylvia is a joyless film, understandably, but not without its attributes. One is seeing Plath's mother played by Paltrow's own mom, Blythe Danner. The scene in which Danner warns about marrying a penniless poet is classic. The greatest pleasure, however, is seeing Paltrow herself in the lead. She captures Plath's shaky side without drenching her entire performance in doom. The director doesn't give Paltrow much of a leash in this tightly wound story, but that suits the subject and the actress perfectly well. Craig, as Hughes, struggles to hold his own - a reversal of the couple's professional lives at the time - and that will be a small but gratifying pleasure for Plath fans who wish Sylvia won more acclaim while still living.

Sylvia opens Friday, Oct. 24

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