Both pics admirably refuse to canonize their most famous characters. Indeed, given its portrait of an artist as a selfish young jerk, “The Edge of Love” reps a companion piece of sorts to Maybury’s “Love Is the Devil,” which examined the unhappy relationship between painter Francis Bacon and his working-class lover George Dyer. Ultimately, none of the characters are terribly sympathetic, which may prove a problem for the women’s-mag market the pic is targeting domestically. The always reliable Murphy adds heft as the troubled William, but still looks miscast in a part that calls for dash as well as dourness. Rhys’ work is sturdy, getting Thomas’ delivery down pat without descending into mere impersonation. Still, she looks terrific, as does Miller, in wide-shouldered 1940s frocks and scarlet slashes of lipstick. (The revisionist script tries a bit too hard, though, to paint Caitlin as a long-suffering victim.) Unfortunately, Knightley, who has yet to prove her mettle as a leading thesp outside a film helmed by Joe Wright, convinces neither as a gauche girl from the valleys nor as a liberated sophisticate of the period. Miller holds her end up beautifully, adding surprising depths to a tricky, mercurial character. Their friendship seems meant to form the real heart of the story, but its arteries keep getting clogged with subplots and digressions, never coming into focus despite a few well-written scenes. While the dialogue keeps emphasizing the convention-defying bond between Vera and Caitlin, their rapport seems more asserted than felt. Consequently, minor characters drift in and out, their relationships to the leads never quite clarified, and there’s a growing sense that the film was cut down from a longer edit.

Like many other literary biopics, the screenplay by Sharman Macdonald (Knightley’s mother, best known for her plays) struggles to cleave a clean narrative out of the mess of real lives and events. When William finally returns shellshocked from the front, revelations tumble out, resentments come to a boil and violence breaks out, with a clumsy last-act shift into courtroom drama and a curiously flat resolution. Overseas, judging by the desaturated color of the lensing, poor William seems to have wandered into a low-budget remake of “Saving Private Ryan.” No one is very happy: Vera pines for William, Dylan drinks and cheats on Caitlin, Caitlin drinks and cheats on Dylan, and the kids cry a lot. Vera is living with Rowatt, her infant son by William, in one cottage while Dylan and Caitlin live a stone’s throw away with their slightly older boy, Llewellyn. However, Vera and William’s romantic idyll is cut short when he’s called up to fight in Greece.Īction then jumps ahead a year or so to the Welsh seaside. William Killick (Cillian Murphy) takes a fancy to Vera she gives him the cold shoulder at first, but their survival together of a bomb attack precipitates their affair and eventual marriage. Before long, the three are sharing an attic room together, with nothing but an impractical, if highly photogenic, diaphanous curtain between their beds for privacy.Įnglish Capt. All the same, she becomes firm friends with his passionate, impetuous wife Caitlin (Miller), an Irish lass who, like Thomas, enjoys a drink or six. (Given Knightley’s singing voice, which is as thin as her figure, and her strained Welsh accent, she’d be well advised not to give up the day job playing posh English totties.) She’s now earning a living singing to the huddled masses in underground shelters during bomb raids.

Vera Philips (Knightley), who grew up with Thomas in Wales. Working in London for the war effort, Dylan Thomas (Welsh thesp Matthew Rhys, best known for TV’s “Brothers and Sisters”) runs into his ex-g.f. Story begins in 1940, in the first bloom of the Blitz.

The edge of love