Earlier this week I caught John Maybury’s The Edge of Love, which opens this week in Los Angeles and next week in New York, for an interview with Matthew Rhys, and to be honest I wasn’t that hot on it, though it had
nothing much to do with the performances. I may or may not get around to reviewing it a bit more properly next week, so until then, some thoughts:

At its core, the film is a World War II-set love quadrangle melodrama centering around the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Rhys), his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), Thomas’ childhood pal Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley) and a soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who insinuates his way into Vera’s heart. It’s nicely constructed, but a bit too long at 111 minutes. Mostly, I just wasn’t a fan of the script
— though intrigued by bits and pieces of what it puts under the microscope (particularly the notion of homefront, “non-heroic” men grappling with returning veterans, who themselves are
grappling with societal re-entry), I felt like the love stories and all the romantic friction were melodramatic, and poorly sketched. I also couldn’t wrap my head around a character
like Caitlin, and why she would permit (and even encourage) an
emotional infidelity between her husband and putative best friend, and then retain any legitimate sense of
shock/betrayal when things got physical. The trailer doesn’t do full justice to Angelo Badalamenti’s score; it makes the film look spliced together from outtakes of The End of the Affair and Atonement, which isn’t so great a thing in my book.