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Monday, October 26, 2009

BD impressions: The Edge of Love

11:02 AM / BD Impressions / No Comments

More like the edge of boredom, upon which I tottered for the duration of this biopic of playwright Dylan Thomas, told primarily from the perspectives of the two women in his life. Despite being beautifully shot by John Maybury (The Jacket) and featuring an excellent performance by the ubiquitous Keira Knightley (who seems to come as some sort of package deal with any British period piece), the film feels limp and inconsequential, spending nearly two hours trying to decide what its focus is. Fundamentally, the film doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, and half-heartedly toys with exploring the personalities of Thomas and the two women but never actually commits.

What we're ultimately left with is a lightweight and unfulfilling glimpse at the wartime exploits (or lack thereof) of a bunch of thoroughly self-centred and unlikeable individuals who really should have stopped whingeing about their own infinitesimal problems and realised that there were bigger fish to fry. Cillian Murphy, as Knightley's husband, sent off to fight in Greece while the rest of them stared at their own belly buttons, emerges as the most sympathetic character, to the extent that when he returns from combat, machine gun in hand, you really do hope he'll just open fire on them all. I'm assuming this wasn't the intention of Maybury or writer Sharman Macdonald (who, yes, is indeed Knightley's mother).

Image quality: Terrific. Detail is absolutely stellar, noticeably more so than in the filtered US release from Image Entertainment. If there are any problems with this title, they are down to the decision shoot using a combination of 35mm film and digital photography courtesy of the Panavision Genesis HD camera, the latter being reserved for a handful of night-time scenes. Due to the grain-free nature of the digital material, I suspect that some of the film-originated footage was lightly degrained to create a more consistent look... or perhaps it's the other way round and some light grain was added to digital material in order to create a more film-like appearance? If that's the case, then those responsible deserve to be commended for their efforts, for while the night scenes shot using the Genesis HD cameras are unmistakably digital, there are a number of daylight scenes in which it is much harder to tell the difference. I've thought long and hard about this, but have concluded that there's really no way in which I can legitimately criticise the image. 10/10

The Edge of Love
studio: Lions Gate; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 21 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 27.3 Mbit/sec

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