Screenhead

Sometimes its feels as if the world of cinema has gone crazy with biopics. It’s probably the one connecting factor throughout the various nations- that a film about a famous person is seen to be a seller, yet it’s usually an incredibly dull affair that boasts one or two noteworthy performances, from Night and Day to La Mome. Another film to add to the list of mediocre biopics is The Edge of Love, a story that centres around the debauchery of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

The film follows the viewpoint of Vera Phillips, Dylan Thomas’s childhood friend and supposedly first love. Working as a singer in London during The Blitz, she comes across Thomas in a bar, who is of course drunk and attempting to wrangle booze money out of friends and family. Their potential romance is marred by the arrival of Thomas’s wife, the borderline nutcase Caitlin, Thomas’s match in promiscuity and alcohol consumption. Vera ends up living with the couple, befriending the normally catty Caitlin. Soon, Vera gets involved with the possessive Killock, who gets shipped off to the War, only to return to a pregnant Vera, and suspicions of her infidelity.

If there’s one surprise in this film, its Keira Knightley’s performance. Many are still dubious about her acting performances. While many saw her role in Atonement as a pouting object, she was probably the best part of the film. And while her “Lizzie” in Pride and Prejudice was slightly off the mark, she deserved her Oscar nomination. In this film, not only is her Welsh accent convincing, but she carries a kind of rural sultriness that makes her character more watchable than it could have been. Sienna Miller is also mildly surprising as Caitlin, effectively capturing her wild charms and madness. Cillian Murphy starts off as a little too seedy as Vera’s suitor, and isn’t given enough space to flesh out his character. And then there’s Matthew Rhys as Dylan Thomas, who does his best but is doomed by the confinements of the script.

For the real problem with the film lies in its characters. Dylan Thomas is portrayed as a top-class cad, only interested in getting them into bed and taking their money. At times we hear bursts of his mesmerising poetry in between scenes, as if the director is attempting to use it as an exemption from Thomas’s despicable behaviour, but all it really does is sour the poet’s wonderful words by reducing them to biographical banality. And by Thomas’s contemptible depiction we thus lose respect for Vera, for she almost cannot help but shack up with or beside Thomas, almost living off his sneers and ill-mannerisms. Caitlin is reduced to a hypocritical loon, furious at Thomas’s cheating but rampantly promiscuous herself, excusing her actions by claiming it means nothing, as if Thomas’s cheating does. Er… does she know nothing about men? And Killick’s actions may be excused by his post-traumatic stress, yet the film fails to delve particularly deep into his paranoia, making it feel deplorable, especially since Vera is so openly loving upon his return. So in total, what we’re left with is a rather traditional tale where they men are selfish and aggressive, and the women are given very little in terms of their own ambitions besides making their man love them.

The real acid test of a film dealing with a famous person is this: would the story be as engaging if that person wasn’t famous? Most biopics fail to be so. Walk the Line is just another TV movie about drug dependency. Sylvia, from what I remember about that awful portrayal of Sylvia Plath, is a soap opera strand about madness. And even Scorsese’s The Aviator, feels like a series of themeless scenes, rather than a coherent film. Even the exceptions to this, like Capote, gets so lost in deriding the writer that it fails to recognise his brilliance. And sadly, The Edge of Love adopts the worst elements from both types: it’s an excruciatingly dull story that does nothing but attempt to highlight the depravity of a great poet.

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