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 In cinemas Thursday [M]
Director: John Maybury
Runtime: 106 minutes
It’s hard to go past poet Dylan Thomas for fitting the image of the mercurial artist who lived hard and died young. Add a volatile romance into the mix – his ex-dancer wife Caitlin – ignited by mutual alcoholism and infidelities and you should have one helluva story. Even more so, you’d think, with the added dynamic of a ménage a trois involving Thomas’s first love Vera Phillips, who also forms a deep friendship with Caitlin.
But The Edge Of Love, which just closed this year’s Brisbane International Film Festival, is disappointingly lacklustre.
Not that the movie isn’t visually splendid, with great attention given to recreating the glamorous look and mood of World War II era films – which of course was far from the reality. And that’s the same feeling produced by playwright Sharman Macdonald’s script. Like John Maybury’s direction, it’s too contrived and mannered to capture the internal dynamics of the characters and the fierce love/hate push-pull of Dylan and Caitlin’s co-dependency.
How much of the story about their relationship with Vera and her husband, British officer William Killick – which culminates in Killick firing rounds into the Thomas’s next-door bungalow – is true remains ambiguous. I’m one of those people who, when the story is based on real-life people, can’t just view it at dramatic face value without questioning how much artistic licence has been employed. In any case, too much relies on pretty words and looks rather than providing insight to the basis of the protagonists’ pivotal bonds.
The casting of the women reinforces the sense of style over substance. Keira Knightley, Macdonald’s daughter, was apparently originally approached to play the untamed free spirit Caitlin, but felt more affinity with the less worldly but nonetheless self-composed Welsh singer Vera. I suspect the reason was more to do with greater dialogue and screentime. Even de-glamorised for her return to Wales with baby, Knightley doesn’t lose that sense of acting rather than being.
Brit cinema’s wild child Miller – who replaced Hollywood’s titleholder Lindsay Lohan – fares better, generating a genuine sense of abandon. I don’t know what Vera actually looked like, but from photos Caitlin appeared earthy and curvy; both actresses register as way too beautiful, skinny and contemporary. It’s a ramification casting “stars” better known for the frequency of appearances in gossip magazines or as fashion plates than their acting accolades. Somehow I think it’s going to be easier to buy Miranda Richardson as Caitlin in the eponymous upcoming release.
The men fare much better – as the iconic Thomas, Welshman Matthew Rhys shows a completely different side from his gay American character in television show Brothers and Sisters. He effectively captures the poet’s charm and a degree of his reckless and self-indulgence, but still falls short of his grotesque extremes.
This is surprising and disappointing when Maybury directed the acclaimed account of another iconoclastic extremist, painter Francis Bacon, in Love Is The Devil.
Ironically, Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who’s given less to say and do, best conveys a harrowing emotional journey with understatement and sensitivity.
Based on its ingredients, The Edge Of Love should have been a far more passionate, turbulent, ugly, dark, disturbing and moving experience than it is.
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OLIVIA STEWART
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