3 reviews

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Glenn Watson June 17, 2008

Edgy, beautiful and often sublime, The Edge of Love is a poem in motion. It’s also long-winded, painful and difficult to care about. Depending on your view.

Existing on the very edge of love – mired in its pains and longings but never enjoying its pleasures – John Maybury’s film is akin to a bad dream: twisting the true and the sweet into sensuous discomfort. It's a fictional spin on poet Dylan Thomas’ dalliance with two women – his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and his former lover Vera (Keira Knightley) and it muses on the mutable laws of attraction and commitment.

Lose yourself in the ebb and flow and The Edge of Love is a powerful evocation of longing and loneliness. Resist its potential charms and this is a tedious rhapsody on the follies of an unsympathetic threesome who deserve all they get. Two hours of bliss, or two hours of your life you won’t get back.

Director John Maybury worked with Keira Knightley on the dreamlike indie The Jacket and displays a fluid approach to the visuals. Along with the acting from Miller, Knightley and Matthew Rhys (as Thomas), Maybury’s direction is the best thing about the movie. Subtle, haunting and evocative of the period (the 1940s), it’s a lyrical work of art. But the script, by Keira’s mother Sharman Macdonald, is painfully clichéd and stilted. It’s the emotions they show that make Caitlin and Vera so raw: the words in their mouths are from another, inferior movie. Yet Sienna Miller’s a revelation and Keira Knightley confounds her critics with a lovely performance.

Even so, Dylan’s depicted as a self-centred rake and the film’s focus on a point-in-time when the ménage-a-trois came together denies us any grounding as to why either woman should’ve loved such a boor. Maybury also misses a trick by never showing the genuine friendship that seemed to develop between Caitlin and Vera: seen too late in a montage of clips, it’s not enough to make us feel what’s at stake when Dylan’s procrastination threatens to destroy the women’s bond.

Lyrical and hypnotic – it’s like a filmic version of Dylan Thomas poem. Prepare to be bowled over or bored to death. Either way, it’s an uncomfortable experience.

Boring, boring, boring. 2 Hours wasted.

If you really want to sit through a two rambling piece of nonsense about 3 hedonistic screwed up individuals, seemingly ignorant of the war going on around them, and the unfortunate bugger that one of them marries then go for it.

You'll have to put up with cliched, soft focus, gratuitous sex scenes.

Putting Keira Knightley and Siena Miller in a bath together summed up this garbage movie as a desperate and exploitative piece of trash masquerading as art.

Thank god you are allowed to drink in the Phoenix.

Chewy 2 Jul 2008

The Edge of Love, probably the artiest film ever to star Keira Knightly, has certainly received a lot of hype – perhaps because of the said involvement of Knightly as Vera Phillips, not to mention that of Sienna Miller, herself something of a darling of the tabloids (more due to her relationships than to any fault of her own). As far as I could tell from the adverts, the cinematography was beautiful, Keira’s face in close-up was even more so, but the fact that Dylan Thomas’ name was attached to it appeared to be an incidental selling point, an “artistic” excuse for an orgy of beautiful shots, beautiful people, and a slightly less beautiful attempt on Knightly’s part to masquerade as a singer. For a fan of Thomas’ “play for voices” Under Milk Wood, the prospect of a literary hero being used an excuse for an exploitative biopic was disappointing, to say the least. The trailer’s striking similarity to Atonement (beautiful Keira separated from husband-at-war; Keira telling said husband “come back to me” in persuasive if pathetic tones, beautiful shots, arty music…) did nothing to relieve my anxiety. However, whilst few of these assumptions have been proved entirely wrong, I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised by the film itself.

The cinematography is indeed impressive. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is spectacular; the shots are leisurely and luscious, and it proves itself a visual delight of a film – despite some of the visual effects verging at times on the psychedelic. What’s more, the visuals are always pertinent, fitting in with the mood of the narrative. Keira’s beauty is much emphasised, but this turns out to be as relevant to the story as everything else, and the repeated close-ups convey something of the claustrophobic nature of desire, as well as the uneasiness of Vera Phillip’s position as an object of various interlocking, sometimes dangerous desires. The premise behind the film is relatively simply: it portrays, or purports to portray (for there are some twists to the truth), the confused and conflicted relationships between poet Dylan Thomas (played with sensitivity by Matthew Rhys), his wife Caitlin MacNamara (Miller), his first love Vera Phillips (Knightly) and her admirer-turned-husband-turned soldier William Killick (Cillian Murphy). The relationships gradually unravel, as the world disintegrates into war around them, and jealousies, disturbances and infidelities come to the fore.

Yet despite the fact that the film concentrates more upon romance than it does upon literature, Dylan’s poetry (and his identity as a poet) provide a constant anchor to the plot's twists and tones. “A poet feeds on life”, Thomas at one point declares, and it is obvious that none of the seemingly destructive periods which he undergoes are wasted in terms of providing poetic inspiration. Sometimes recited to one of the lead women, sometimes providing a wistful soundtrack in voiceover, Thomas’ poetry is the backbone to the film, and Rhys’ beautiful voice more than does it justice. However, it is Vera Phillips, caught up in a love triangle almost against her will, who is the film’s true heroine, and Knightly convincingly portrays her as such. Indeed, this is the first film that has convinced me that Knightly can actually act, as opposed to elegantly going through the motions. Here I get the sense of Knightly’s Vera as a real, troubled, flawed, and likeably human woman; I am able to forget the famous name that is playing her, despite the camera’s insistence in returning to her face. The performance is moving and sympathetic, and her on-screen chemistry with Rhys, with Miller (who is convincingly lifelike as Thomas’ tempestuous wife) and with Murphy, who complements her beauty with his own chiselled features and sexily gruff voice, that gives this film its energy and life.

My only real criticism of the film is of the script. Whilst the power of the actors makes this less obvious as the film progresses, and the beauty of Thomas’ poetry helps to mask it, the dialogue is at times clunky and stagey, far from life-like. This is a shame, for it prevents a good film from being great. Another, small criticism is of including quite so much of Knightly’s singing: she is perfectly competent, and her screen presence more than makes up for any deficiencies, but the fact is that she is not a natural singer, and it comes across in the lack of depth to her voice, thus rendering her part a little less believable.

Yet these are small problems, and did not diminish my enjoyment in the film. The Edge of Love belies first impressions, and if literary biopics, doomed love triangles, and arty cinematography are your thing, be sure not to miss it.

Emma Whipday 12 Jun 2008