The presence of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as a carousing lead character gives The Edge of Love some edge and verve to which it otherwise wouldn’t and couldn’t rightly lay claim, but the film overall still never truly sets sail. It’s a gorgeously shot, grand romantic misfire.

Written by Sharman Macdonald and directed by John Maybury, the movie is, at its core, a World War II-set love quadrangle melodrama centering around Thomas (Matthew Rhys), his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), Thomas’ childhood pal Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley)
and a soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who slowly insinuates his way
into Vera’s heart. It opens in the London underground during the air blitz of 1940, where Vera croons torch songs to help steel the resolve of passersby. She and Thomas reconnect, and some hyper-literate flirting over cigarettes ensues; naturally, because he’s a roguish cad, Thomas fails to mention the fact that he’s married, and even has a kid.

Not that it matters, really. Though domesticity and the decisions that it foists upon folks are in theory thematically in play here, since The Edge of Love spans several years, the laxness and intellectual dishonesty with which they’re handled makes for plenty of eye-rolling and awkwardness. When Vera eventually yields to William’s amorous advances — just before he goes off to war — she gets pregnant, which leads to she, Caitlin and Dylan eventually moving back to Wales, where grey-skies moping and infidelity ever-so-predictably follows.

There are bits and pieces of intrigue here, chiefly in what Maybury puts under the
microscope, and most particularly the parallel notion of homefront (i.e., “non-heroic”) men
grappling with returning veterans, who themselves are
grappling with re-entry into society at large. The love stories and all
the romantic friction, though — the vast majority of the movie, both in substance and in terms of what drives the movie’s tone — feels poorly sketched, melodramatic and leaden. 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. That is one of a couple key incongruities in Macdonald’s screenplay.

I previously branded the film as seemingly spliced together from outtakes of The End of the Affair and Atonement, which actually gives it nominal credit for a scope and grandeur that it doesn’t really achieve. Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti provides another characteristically lush and beckoning score, but this isn’t even really a movie for the Danielle Steele set. The Edge of Love is a bit too arty and concerned with quasi-historical detail to catch fire as a romance (doomed or otherwise), and it’s too yawningly familiar in its major chord plotting to set sail as a honest character ensemble. (Capitol Films/BBC, R, 111 minutes)