ScreenWize

Director John Maybury carefully mixes the real life of Dylan Thomas with fiction to create a beautiful and touching tribute to romantic love and friendship. Matthew Rhys plays Dylan Thomas, the poet who sat out the Second World War with more than a bottle or two to fuel his famous poetry. Impoverished and scorned as a pacifist, Thomas and his wife Caitlan MacNamara (Sienna Miller) move in with Vera Phillips (Kera Knightley)and the two women become friends despite the fact that Thomas and Phillips were childhood sweethearts and Thomas still clearly aches for her. Phillips resists Thomas’s attempts at rekindling a relationship and marries a dashing soldier William Killick (Cillian Murphy). But when he goes off to war the threesome move to a remote seaside cottage and get tangled in complex triangle of fondness, desire and habit.

Maybury chooses an elaborate visual style to tell this story about the space where friendship collides with love, and much of the film is shot through glass, thin breezy curtains and mirrors which, combined with the soft lighting, makes for a sensuous glowing ambiance. Screenwriter Sharman Macdonald’s lyrical and thoughtful dialogue and the carefully studied performances of the four principles make this an intense and absorbing film.

SW

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon