As a saying goes: two’s company, three’s a crowd. There are times in The Edge of Love when it looks like Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys), his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley), an old friend who lost her virginity to him at the age of 15 and who he meets again in blitz-threatened London some years later, actually make for a happy threesome. However, as the drama progresses, it proves, especially when army officer William Killick (Cillian Murphy) enters the mix, that human relationships can be very turbulent and complicated indeed.
Although the film has been described as a Dylan Thomas biopic, Keira Knightley’s character is introduced first and gets the most sympathy and screen time. At the start of this World War II tale, Vera appears as a seductive singer charged with helping to temporarily transport citizens of a city under attack away from their fears and woes inside crowded London Underground shelters. (Incidentally, Knightley does her own singing of songs that, with the rest of the music in this technically hard-to-fault movie, help create all the appropriate moods and tone.)
After a chance encounter with the first love of her life, you can just see Vera lighting up and thinking that she could get together again with him, only to have her dreams rudely shattered by his belatedly introducing her to the feisty female he had married and fathered a child with. But even while she could not have been faulted if she had put as much distance as possible between herself and the Thomases, Vera seems unable to do so. After Dylan and Caitlin are kicked out of Caitlin’s sister’s house in London, the couple even end up moving in with her.
An initially wary Caitlin is won over by Vera – so much so that at one point in this film, which apparently started out being entitled The Best Time of Our Lives, she tells her, “Pity you’re not a man. If you were a man, I’d fancy you!” And for all of Vera ending up marrying the army officer William Killick after what seems like an all-too-brief courtship, it often seems that the relationship between the two women is at the heart of this film whose scriptwriter, Sharman MacDonald, is Keira Knightley’s real-life mother.
Given how interesting Keira Knightley and, even more so, Sienna Miller make their characters, it’s a pity that The Edge of Love doesn’t focus more on this female friendship: The strongest tie in the movie feels less developed than it could be. Additionally, in a film whose two main male characters often don’t come across as generally good company, never mind marital catches (Dylan Thomas is a shameless sponger and William Killick a man who should have known the score better and earlier), it might well have been more satisfying if time and effort had been devoted to compelling reasons why this pair of passionate women deemed their men worthy of their affections.

Yvonne Teh