Taken in by her reclusive, eccentric uncle, Lottie moves into Forsaken, his vast manor located in the gray wasteland between the Land of the Living and Ever After, the land of the dead. But at the sudden loss of her parents, all the color is stripped from Lottie’s heart and the world around her. And Lottie is no exception she can paint pictures to life in every shade and hue imaginable. Lottie lives in Vivelle-the heart of a vibrant city where life exists in brilliant technicolor and nearly everyone has magic. Entire scenes take place in which nothing happens and nothing changes.A spellbinding tale of magical realism and superb, twisty retelling of The Secret Garden, where twelve-year-old Lottie’s colorful world turns suddenly gray when an unexpected accident claims her parents, and she is uprooted from her home to live with an eccentric uncle she never knew she had-on the border that separates the living and the dead. Then, when William has to go back to the front, Dylan, Caitlin and Vera all move to the countryside, and there the film collapses. Sorry, but with Dylan Thomas in the movie, the shift to a less interesting male character isn't good news. Gradually, "The Edge of Love" begins to focus on Vera's relationship with William (Cillian Murphy), a soldier with a spooky, soulful expression. In her carriage and line-readings, Miller exudes an essence at once older and quite different from what she has shown in the past. Only when the camera gets close can you see that this is an actress in her mid-20s. Young and vibrant, she appears worn and dissipated here, her smile haunted by a hint of disappointment, the look of a person who has discovered she can't trust herself. Perhaps she took the role as a favor to her mother, Sharman Macdonald, who wrote the screenplay. But the usual Knightley - young, chipper and radiant with the joy of self - doesn't make sense incarnating a 30ish woman who has seen more than her share. She does the role well, without a false or awkward moment. Knightley can sing and act, and she can probably even dance, for all I know, but something about her feels out of place in this film. But the movie is a lot less frolicsome than that.Īs Vera, Knightley gets to stretch a bit and play a wartime chanteuse, who sings in the London underground as the Luftwaffe pounds away outside. That's when the movie gets interesting: "The Edge of Love" seems as if it's going to be about a great poet and his two lovers, three vivid personalities living a reckless life in wartime London, getting drunk and jumping into bed between air raids. Unaccountably, and yet these things can happen, Caitlin and Vera hit it off immediately. Rhys passes the first test: Within 30 seconds, you believe that he wrote all those poems and that Vera would find him delightful, even though he's slovenly and already not the healthiest-looking specimen.ĭylan, in fact, has two women - the one he makes love to with words (Knightley) and Caitlin (Sienna Miller), the one he's married to. We meet Dylan (Matthew Rhys) at the bar, charming a childhood sweetheart, Vera (Keira Knightley), in his poetic, bad-boy, moody way. It's based on some drama in the life of Dylan Thomas and contains the best and worst aspects of a movie grounded in real-life detail: It has the built-in significance of truth and the structureless, pointlessness of fact.įor a while, though, it looks like a grand old time. "The Edge of Love" holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.
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