The Edge of Love film review

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THE EDGE OF LOVE

It's not so much a question of don't put your daughter on the stage but think twice before allowing your mother to write the screenplay as far as Keira Knightley's new film is concerned. Sharman Macdonald, the playwright and Knightley's mother, has fashioned a ploddy script based on a purportedly pivotal moment in the life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. It's only the creative direction of John Maybury and a spirited central turn by Knightley that enliven matters. Otherwise, edgy it most certainly isn't.

Knightley stars as Vera Phillips who - according to the script - was a childhood sweetheart of Thomas in Wales. The action of the film is set in the early part of WWII with Thomas (Matthew Rhys) working as a scriptwriter on propaganda films and Phillips plying her trade as a singer. A chance meeting in a pub reunites the two and there is clearly still a spark between them.

Things become muddled however when Thomas' wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) arrives in town and Phillips begins to attract the interest of handsome army officer William Killick (Cillian Murphy). For a while the quartet leads a relatively joyful existence despite the blitz, but when they move to Wales to bring up their children and Killick is sent abroad to fight events take a turn for the dramatic.

At least that's the theory: one of the key problems with the film is that it takes so long for said drama to arrive. Also the intensity of the complex relationship between the four is never really convincingly portrayed. Knightley and Murphy are believable, but Rhys' Thomas is far too one dimensional and Miller - a late replacement for the American star Lindsay Lohan - struggles to equal any of them.

Award-winning director John Maybury (Love is the Devil, The Jacket) does a decent job with limiting material but all of his visual skills can't stop the project from being a bit of an unfocussed mess.

Paul Hurley