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.
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.