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Review: The Edge of Love

A soap opera about Dylan Thomas
By PETER KEOUGH  |  April 3, 2009
1.5 1.5 Stars


Trailer of The Edge of Love

John Maybury evoked the genius of Francis Bacon in Love Is the Devil, but he goes off the deep end with this ludicrous soap opera about Dylan Thomas.

During the London Blitz in 1940, Thomas (Matthew Rhys, drawing on Richard Burton) pops into an Underground shelter, and who should be singing show tunes there but his old Welsh flame Vera (Keira Knightley)? Thomas is married to Caitlin (Sienna Miller in lieu of Lindsay Lohan), so the three form a ménage that conjures Henry and June.

Spoiling things, though, is creepy Captain William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who marries Vera and then parachutes into Greece. Dylan hammers on a keyboard and William blasts away at Jerries, but neither appreciates his wife for who she is, so the girls hop into a tub and bond.

Oh, and Dylan is a poet: those are his poems intoned behind the background music. And Maybury is a poetic filmmaker, as you can see in a montage that alternates birth throes with a battlefield amputation. Do not go gently into this bad film.

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