Tonight:
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Biopics of poets have never caught on in a very big way for good reasons. The main point about poets is the poetry they write - and watching people fiddle with words on a page just isn't a hot ticket.
So, if biopics of poets we must have, we must look elsewhere for interest - say, to what they got up to in the bedroom, just to pick an example, completely at random, of the kind of thing that might serve. Thus we have had the ghastly Tom & Viv, the dreadful Sylvia and now The Edge of Love, about the romantic entanglements of Dylan Thomas.
The Edge of Love is directed by John Maybury - previously known for Love is the Devil about Francis Bacon's tortured amours - in quite a mannered style, featuring lots of shots in which one person is upside down in relation to another - quite a difficult posture to bring off in real life but probably handily symbolic on the screen.
Dylan, his wife Caitlin, his love interest Vera and her soldier husband William are all played by young, great-looking actors - Matthew Rhys, Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller and Cillian Murphy - and they are fawned on by the camera, made to look good all the time, with the girls apparently dressed exclusively from the Toast catalogue. Caitlin herself later complained that Dylan Thomas was a short, comical figure with a bulbous snout and blubbering lips (plus, for good measure, a minnow down below) but here he's quite the film star.
Maybury maintains that he hasn't really made a film about the poet Dylan Thomas, but "about the women and their relationships", and beyond that, "about what's going on now, in the world". It's true, too.
Mostly, we see the Dylan Thomas ménage, in wartime London and Wales, being as bohemian as may be. Only the poet's selfishness disrupts the love affair between the two women, who couldn't be happier in bath and bed together without him.
Apart from an addled pee into a plant-pot early on, Dylan's boozing is lightly treated. In reality, according to one of Caitlin's gruelling memoirs, he "drank roughly 20 pints a night", which must have been smelly. But then the image this film-maker wishes to project is of artists as romantically tormented clubbers, not grungey hogs.
At times, a little poetry creeps in - Dylan is seen typing while a voiceover intones - but this is yet another film about the artistic lifestyle, not about art. As are they all, the bio-pix of the makers.
As it happens, in the case of Dylan Thomas, that's not just no great loss or even no loss at all, but positively a boon and a blessing. Kingsley Amis once summed up Dylan Thomas's poetry as "Piss with froth on, you remember". Hands off the good poets, though.
