(Not so) Old Movie Madness - The Edge of Love (2008)

I'd been looking forward to this for a while, I'm now not sure why.  Set during WW2 the film centres around Dylan Thomas and the two women in his life, his wife Caitlin and his boyhood crush Vera and the tensions between them.

Dylan is shown as a pompous, egotist - pretty accurate in my experience of artists I must say - and comes across as thoroughly unpleasant.  The two female leads are also vile, both are entranced by the cliched doomed romance of penniless alcoholic poet almost to the point of their destruction.  Yawn.

Caitlin (played by an actually pretty good Sienna Miller) is an empty woman emotionally self-harming by welcoming her husbands former love into their lives in some bizarre menage-a-trois and then hating herself for it.  She sleeps around to try and make herself feel better but flies into jealous rages if Dylan even looks at another woman.

Vera (Keira Knightley in yet another period drama) is a frigid souled ice queen who marries a man she doesn't love and seems to be oblivious to the pain she is causing by interfering in her friends marriage.

And look at her weird mouth.

The whole thing comes to a head when Vera's husband (Cillian Murphy, all blue eyes and shell shock) comes home and the stress of living amongst these horrors sends him mad.  For some reason he has a grenade - sadly it didn't blow them all up. 

Dylan takes him to court and despite clearly being a tad off kilter they let him off, I can only imagine because they hope he has another grenade and will do it properly next time.  The couples part - staying with their respective spouses and destined I expect to torture each other for evermore.

The only, ONLY, good thing about this film was the clothing.  Some great coats at the court scenes and in general lots of lovely knitwear.   You can see this in the pictures below though, so please don't bother watching this unless you want to come out of it feeling cheated and depressed.