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Edge Of Love (The)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Image Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (17th September 2009). |
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The Film
 Most biopic movies are very upfront about who they’re covering, putting their name in the title or somewhere in the major placement of the movie to show them off as a central character in the movie. “The Edge of Love” (2008) is a biopic of a poet I’ve never heard of, starring an actor I’ve never seen, but mostly focused on another character. Rather than being totally about Matthew Rhys’ portrayal of welsh poet Dylan Thomas, it’s more involved with a love triangle/quadrangle, giving as much time to the women surrounding Thomas as the poet himself. The fact that I’ve never even heard of the poet makes it probably a good decision that they only theatrically released the movie in England (also since the Blu-ray cover seems like a mirrored image of “Atonement” (2007) and it could be confused for “Atonement 2: They’re Welsh Now”). Still it’s a surprisingly visual movie that’s moderately interesting, but could be slightly shorter for my tastes. Though the movie is purported to be a biopic of Thomas, the movie mostly focuses on Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley), a singer in some underground London clubs, who was childhood friends with Thomas. After they meet again, they seem to fall slightly back in love with one another, only Thomas is already married to Caitlin MacNamara (Sienna Miller). However the couple seem to have a more open relationship, Caitlin and Vera become close friends. Soon Vera becomes more romantically involved with William Killick (Cillian Murphy) a soldier who she will later marry just as he is called off to war. Killick is a bit skeptical of the relationship between Vera and Dylan, but is drawn off to war while Vera must stay home and have their child. Dylan, Vera and Caitilin move back to Whales and continue living together, while Killick is scarred on the warfront. I usually wait until the video section of the movie, but the transfer of the film looks so good I have to bring it up here. The lighting in the movie and some of the colors and shot selection of the film looks so good on the transfer it bumps up the content of the film. Keira Knightley’s chin looks sharper than ever and there are some great color shots or weird uses of lighting, like in the projector room scene, that really stand out in the film and look really great in the transfer. Blu-ray makes this sort of lighting use shine and helps to make the visual elements of John Maybury’s directing all the better. However the film isn’t purely visual either, and the visuals are matched by a fairly good script that knows how to create a group of moderately interesting characters, but it does tend to sort of drift and wander through the story. For not knowing who Dylan Thomas was as a real character, I didn’t learn too much but I liked that about the film, how it isn’t about glorifying or villianizing some historical person (though movies that do this aren’t bad either). It’s more about the weird relationship situation between the poet, the veteran and their wives, though mostly on their wives. I like the fact that the subject of the biopic is fourth billing in the movie. And for the story that wanders, the actors do a good job of moving through the movie. Rhys does a good job of being the sort of aloof, womanizing alcoholic without overplaying it, while Sienna Miller looks good on film and does a good job of acting to her role as Thomas’s wife while making me want to revisit “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra” (2009). Knightly and Murphy do their usual good job of acting, however none of the performances in the film are really enough to blow me away or really draw me further into the film. Overall the film is a nice visual and auditory experiment with the varied lighting schemes in the movie and Angelo Badalamenti’s awesome score. The acting, the story and directing are all nice and keep the film moving, but the pacing seems off and the movie seems to go on too long in some scenes and cut away too early in others and can sometimes just be a bit too pretentious or arty. Additionally the movie could have used a bit of a trim, at nearly 2 hours it gets a bit much after watching for so long. “Edge of Love” is a pleasant surprise in that I expected to be bored senseless and hate the movie, when I found myself enjoying parts and really jumping in and out of interest for the movie. It wasn’t great by any means, but it’s still good enough to sit through for a watch.
Video
The 1080p 24/fps 1.85:1 transfer with AVC MPEG-4 encoding is something Image Entertainment should honestly be proud of. This movie doesn’t have a huge budget, is shot on film, and is transferred flawlessly to Blu-ray. It brings the weight of film without losing any sort of clarity, looking as crisp and clean as the lighting allows, no problems with grain or noise despite the constant smoking in the film. Even some of the archive footage is graded really well and looks clean. It may be the varied lighting schemes in the movie that make it shine, but they look amazing. Even though it’s not that great of a movie, it may be one of the best looking Blu-ray’s I’ve seen this side of fully digital movies like “WALL•E” (2008).
Audio
Though not as impressive as the visual transfer, the English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track mixed at 48kHz/16-bit still sounds very good. It does a great job of bringing together Badalamenti’s score with the rest of the film in proper balance. The weird sound effects that pop out in the film all appear in tandem and the dialogue mixes well with the rest of the ambient noises of the film. It doesn’t quite have the same clarity and flare as the visual track, but I’m much more of a visual person than focused on audio nitpicking so it may be more impressive than I’m letting on. There is also an English Dolby Digital 5.1 track with English for the hearing impaired and Spanish subtitles.
Extras
For the great production job on the transfer of the film, it’s a little skimpy on extras featuring only one audio commentary track, a featurette, a gag reel and a theatrical trailer. The audio commentary track features director John Maybury and actor Matthew Rhys. The commentary begins with the two joking about the film and it doesn’t go much further than that. It’s a nice, lighthearted commentary, though with it’s fair share of pauses and gaps. They talk a bit about making the film, but are sure not to spend too much time being serious about the movie, and go back to calling the movie terrible, Maybury constantly jokes about how the actresses won’t work with him again. The two are also quick to admit when the commentary becomes a love fest, just praising the actors, but there are some good question and response sequences where Rhys will ask about technique and Maybury has some quip about just being clever or some dry sarcasm about the scene being an homage. The lone featurette “Looking Over ‘The Edge of Love’” runs for 9 minutes and 40 seconds, bringing Sienna Miller, Keira Knightley and John Maybury to what looks like 2 different press junket rooms to just talk about the movie spliced over with clips of the film. It’s a fairly unimpressive featurette, as there’s no behind-the-scenes footage, and the interviews hit some points that are covered in the commentary, only less facetiously. There are some extra points about putting together the film, cast parties, but otherwise fairly sparse for a making-of. The gag reel runs for 4 minutes and 10 seconds and is about as close to behind-the-scenes footage as the movie will get, as it’s a bunch of mistakes set to a soundtrack like other gag reels. Lots of cigarettes and laughter. The theatrical trailer runs for 1 minute and 35 seconds.
Overall
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