The Edge Of Love

It's a film about Dylan Thomas, which doesn't tell you much about him at all.

The film opens during the Blitz, where Ikea Knightley, sorry I mean Keira Knightley, has returned to the scene of her death in Atonement and is singing 'down in the tube station at midnight' or something like that. She's Vera Phillips and she's about to make the same mistake again and fall for another solider that goes off to war.

She wanders into a bar where she bumps into her childhood sweetheart and first shag, a Mr Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys), who is currently churning out not very poetic government propaganda films. She has high hopes of picking up where they left off until he introduces his wife, the manic Caitlin (Sienna Miller), not that this will make any difference to his interest in our Keira.



From this point on Dylan Thomas becomes pretty much a side issue as the film focuses on the two feisty women but mainly on Vera. Despite their rivalry over Dylan, the women form an uneasy friendship. Caitlin likes her own infidelities, possibly for the money and probably because her husband is supposedly servicing a long line of infatuated women but the film offers no evidence of this. Dylan justifies his actions by saying that a poet cannot remain faithful, as he needs to experience his vices to the full, of which heavy smoking and drinking are clearly two others. There's an awful lot of smoking in the film, probably putting the anti-smoking campaign back years.

Vera meets and marries an annoyingly persistent admirer of hers William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who promptly knocks her up and then buggers off to war, seemingly for at least eighteen months. During which time the others begin living as a threesome in two cottages atop a Welsh cliff top, where they all somehow resist hurling themselves off.



It was absolutely certain that William would return from war assuming Vera and Dylan had been at it like rabbits, I'm sure he decided this before he even left. That is even before you add in the fact that he is now traumatised by war. So are we, after they undercut Vera giving birth with an amputation on the battlefield. Therefore, it's no great surprise when he attacks Dylan with a shotgun. The surprise is that he misses.

It's a pretentious film with little focus, which gives only a slight insight into Dylan Thomas and his poetry. It's impossible to care about any of the characters. The film is supposedly about the friendship of the two women but we never get the impression they actually become friends in the truest sense. L hates Dylan's character; I hate William's character, so we kind of agree.



Acting wise, the men are ok, they even get a native Welsh speaker in to play Dylan, which is unusual casting these days. Keira Knightly is not that bad, she tries hard, bless her and she is easily out-planked by Miller, who is more Wurzles than Welsh, and makes Keira's lapses in and out of her accent look positively impressive.

No 'edge', no 'love' and if it was meant as a tribute to a supposedly 'great' poet, then it was totally uninspiring in that as well but then I always detested 'Under Milk Wood' after studying it at school. As for my class, if you'd handed us a shotgun, we wouldn't have missed.