The Edge of Love.

""'I sleep with other women because I'm a poet, and a poet feeds off life!' The speaker is the super-sonorous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, played here by Matthew Rhys," notes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "and the line's cringe-making awfulness is sadly typical of [The Edge of Love]: full of defiant bohemian giggling and exuberant artistic types drinking heavily, dancing together round tatty rooms to wind-up gramophones and plucking lit cigarettes out of each other's mouths: 'Gissa drag on that, boy!'"

Updated through 6/22.

"Fortunately for us, the film is much less about Thomas than it is about two women who were central to his life," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent. "[John] Maybury's camera catches the giddy energy of the friends' saloon-bar carousing, but he also finds a visual language for the crosscurrents of tension and jealousy that crackle between them.... I'm not sure [Keira] Knightley or [Sienna] Miller have ever been more beautifully photographed, and they reward the director with what are, by a long chalk, their best performances."

"[I]t's all very well bucking the biopic trend and shunting Dylan Thomas into the sidings, but there has to be something to take his place," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "But no amount of stylistic gusto can disguise the film's flimsiness, or its peculiar and off-putting inner tensions. For all the sniping against Dylan Thomas, it was presumably his name that got the film made in the first place. And it is Thomas's lines from 'In My Craft or Sullen Art' that chime out in the final moments, essentially giving him the last word over the women the film purports to defend."

"The reality of the Blitz is left to archive as Maybury keeps things personal, depicting alleyways at night, smoky pubs and cramped flats as an intense friendship builds between Caitlin and Vera," writes Dave Calhoun for Time Out. "Vera meets and marries William (Cillian Murphy), a straight-backed soldier who leaves for service overseas; and Caitlin and Vera buzz around Thomas like Jules et Jim after a sex change."

Knightley is "much better than might be imagined," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu, but: "The real star of The Edge of Love is Sienna Miller, whose Caitlin is dynamic, bawdy and fun... She lends drive and sparkle to a film that doesn't quite know what it's trying to do or say, but is darkly seductive and entertaining none the less."

"The Edge of Love is at least a partial success, having an excellent period atmosphere and performances from a quartet of stars who do a fair job on a screenplay that moves backwards and forwards from the banal to the truthful as the plot progresses," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard.

For the Guardian, Aida Edemariam talks with Maybury about, among many other things, Francis Bacon, Derek Jarman and Christopher Marlowe. "I come from an abusive background - alcoholic parents, abused by Jesuits when I was a kid. Every cliche in the book, basically."

Joan Walsh talks with Knightley for the Independent.

Murphy Williams profiles Miller for the Telegraph.

Earlier: Kate Stables in Sight & Sound and first impressions from Edinburgh.

Update, 6/21: "Tom and Viv, Ted and Sylvia, and now Dylan and Caitlin: there is something about poets and their spouses that fascinates filmmakers," writes Andrew Lycett in the Guardian. "The Edge of Love's romanticised storyline has Thomas whooping it up in London during the Blitz, working as a scriptwriter in the thriving wartime film propaganda industry.... I have a special interest in this aspect of Thomas's output since, when researching his biography at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, I came across The Art of Conversation, one of his wartime propaganda scripts, which had lain there, unknown and unpublished, for 40 years." Extracts follow, but the full version is here, as a PDF.

Update, 6/22: "This is a fascinating story, its chronology somewhat muddled and its dramatic thrust rather obscure," writes Philip French in the Observer.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2008 5:18 AM