At the Movies: The Edge of Love
The Edge of Love may be partly about Dylan Thomas, but it's not really about Dylan Thomas. A movie top-billing Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller probably can't be.
It is about love (of course), friendship (which is at the edge of love) and war and the things that people do to each other in their names. They say that all's fair in love and war. Well, on the evidence provided by this film, it ain't.
It's wartime and roistering Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys) is in blitz-ridden London being forced to write scripts for propaganda films. He's there with his hard-case wife Caitlin (Miller) and meets his childhood sweetheart Vera Phillips (Knightley) in a bar. Vera is being pursued by William Killick (Cillian Murphy) whom she eventually marries. In the four years canvassed by the film, the lives of the two couples, and especially those of the two women, intertwine in almost every way possible.
The story behind the film is interesting too. The film's producer, Rebekah Gilbertson, is the real-life granddaughter of Vera Phillips and William Killick. She became aware of an incident that happened in 1945 involving her grandparents, the Thomases and a loaded machine-gun. The film is a fictional attempt at fleshing out the drama surrounding the two couples. It's fictional because it seems that the real-life relationship between Thomas and Phillips was not a sexual one, but the film-makers are not going to let the "truth" get in the way of a good story.
The Edge of Love does have a good story (Knightley's mother Sharman MacDonald wrote the screenplay), and director John Maybury makes full use of the tricks of his trade to tell it in powerful ways. The lighting, music and sound are moody and atmospheric and the film has a designed kind of appearance. It is so visual, so made, that often I felt I could almost see the hand of the director, the cinematographer Jonathon Freeman or the art director Mark Raggett.
So the film is very easy on the eye and ear. It succeeds in its depiction of the intersecting lives of four interesting people and especially two interesting women. As an admirer of Thomas' work, I struggled with the idea that the film wasn't about the work in any real sense. It's easier to forgive Thomas's fecklessness, excesses and cruelty if you've recently been spellbound by the beauty of his words. The film does the character foibles well, but the man's words are kind of taken as read or read in voice-overs and that's a shame.
In case you haven't recently been spellbound, here's a taste from the end of Thomas' poem Fern Hill.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Neil Wilson
THE EDGE OF LOVE (M). Next screening at the Village Theatre, Sunday 8 February at 5.00pm.
