Maybury tackles the great Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love, a speculative investigation into a cloudy period of the poet and dramatist's personal life. [Blu-ray]
The Edge of Love (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 52
Fresh: 18
Rotten:34
Average Rating: 5/10
Consensus: Despite effective performances from Knightley and Miller, The Edge of Love lacks a coherent narrative.
Theatrical Release:2008
Synopsis:
Two feisty, free-spirited women are connected by a brilliant, charismatic poet who loves them both.
The passion and pathos of legendary poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys) is told through the lives...
Two feisty, free-spirited women are connected by a brilliant, charismatic poet who loves them both.
The passion and pathos of legendary poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys) is told through the lives of two extraordinary women. Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley) and Dylan were each other's first loves who feel the thunderbolt once more when they unexpectedly meet in London ten years later. Caitlin (Sienna Miller) is his adventurous wife, wily at using her beauty and always up for a bit of fun.
Despite their love-rival status, the women form a surprising friendship -- and though bombs rain down on London, the trio indulge in the glory of being young, and alive. When Vera meets and marries handsome Officer William Killick (Cillian Murphy), Dylan resents his trio becoming a foursome -- and Caitlin notes it.
The collapse of their group is avoided when William gets sent away to war -- and the others move back to rural Wales. With Vera now heavily pregnant and missing a husband who never writes back, the battle between her heart and head becomes more intense. William's return instigates a confrontation that has long been brewing -- but the savagery of his attack on Dylan finally forces Vera
to choose between the men in her life and the friend that she loves.
Desire and guilt are complicated by love and friendship in this real-life tale set in beautiful London and the majestic Welsh countryside. --© Official Site
Starring: Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy, Matthew Rhys
Starring: Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy, Matthew Rhys, Simon Armstrong, Ben Batt, Geoffrey Beevers, Paul Brooke
Director: John Maybury
Director: John Maybury
Screenwriter: Sharman MacDonald
Producer: Rebekah Gilbertson, Sarah Radclyffe
Composer: Angelo Badalamenti
Studio: Capitol Films
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Release:
Jul 14, 2009
Reviews for The Edge of Love
Ah, the London Blitz. Bombs falling, buildings on fire, people dying all around. Good times, good times.
A bit too arty and concerned with quasi-historical detail to catch fire as a romance (doomed or otherwise), and too yawningly familiar in its major chord plotting to set sail as a honest character ensemble.
While all the pieces are there for an intriguing film, John Maybury's The Edge of Love never really becomes anything.
The Edge of Love is literate and often lovely to look at, but unless you're requesting an off-key bohemian rhapsody, do not go gentle into that good theater.
The Edge of Love holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.
This may be Knightley's first truly mature performance. Too bad it arrives wrapped in doggerel.
Though very uneven in style and focus . . . the fraught complications among the foursome raise universal issues of freewheeling young love and friendship during wartime.
The picture's combination of stylistic splash and pretentious turgidity makes for a long slog. It may be accurate, but by the time it drags to an end, you won't really care.
A period romance, charged with provocative undercurrents about art, war and the eternal battle of the sexes.
For all its vivid evocation of its characters' tomorrow-we-die bonhomie, the film finally never quite convinces viewers of its central subject: the sisterly, almost sapphic bond between Vera and Caitlin.
While Thomas fans will regret seeing their literary hero reduced to a generic drunk, even those awaiting the aforementioned bathtub scene will find it barely worth the effort.
More a Gary Springer sex brawl than a Blitzkrieg bohemian romp, with Dylan mainly playing incorrigibly horny and urinating on house plants. And a court duel from nowhere, with the entire free love posse nastily at each other's throats. Paging Nancy Grace.
Booze and jealousy make a toxic cocktail, one that’s heavily imbibed with much self-lacerating gusto in the grim British drama The Edge of Love.
The Edge of Love is the sort of muddled melodrama that has little to say about love, or anything else.
Notably only for a first act that credibly depicts a four-way relationship among friends and lovers without tilting embarrassingly toward titillation and/or soap opera.
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