"The Edge of Love": Two couples get tangled up in melodrama

John Maybury's curious drama "The Edge of Love" is about two couples in wartime England and Wales, and a love triangle contained therein. Vera (Keira Knightley) was the first love of Dylan (Matthew Rhys), who then went on to marry Caitlin (Sienna Miller). Reconnecting later in London, the two women become friends, and Vera meets and marries a handsome officer, William (Cillian Murphy), before he returns to the front. Nonetheless, a spark remains between Vera and Dylan, watched jealously by Caitlin and William ...

OK, wait a minute. Dylan, it turns out, is the legendary Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, but the movie doesn't seem to care much about this, preferring instead to focus on Knightley and Miller alluringly sharing cigarettes and confidences in tatty London flats or windswept Swansea bungalows. (This is rather like making a movie about Oscar Wilde and focusing entirely on Lord Alfred Douglas.) Aside from a few poems Rhys murmurs (and the fact that he uses "Because I'm a poet" as a defense for infidelity), there's little evidence that Dylan is much of anything except a young man who drinks too much.

This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except that Vera and Caitlin aren't particularly interesting either. The movie, though pretty, suffers from aimlessness: Maybury seems more interested in Knightley's precise red lipstick than in anything her character actually does. (Knightley's styled to look very much like her character in "Atonement," a far better young-people-in-wartime-London movie that this film doesn't do itself any favors by recalling.) Aside from a few odd stylistic flourishes — a scene shot, presumably, through urine (!); a pair of enormous eyes suddenly appearing in a window — "The Edge of Love" is the sort of muddled melodrama that has little to say about love, or anything else.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com