It's about time. The Oscar bait material has started to trickle in. See The Edge of Love here and Julia down in Catch o' the Day

The Edge of Love

The way I look at it, Dylan Thomas was the Mickey Mantle of literature. Both men were considered superstars while still in their teens, and of both of them it could be said, "Damn, as good as he was, imagine how much better he might have been, had he stayed sober." Dylan Thomas was not a serious intellectual like Ezra Pound, nor a crusader like W.H. Auden, nor a meticulous craftsman like T.S. Eliot, and he had neither the education nor the discipline one would expect from a serious writer, but there was no denying that he had talent. He was a true natural genius. Among all the 20th century poets, he had perhaps the greatest natural gift for capturing the rhythm and the inherent musicality of the English language. He also became a genuine pop superstar by performing theatrical basso recitations of his own compositions, often followed by some flamboyant public behavior. Since his fame provided him with women eager to pick him up, and with men eager to pick up his bar tabs, he lived out his thirties as a drunkard and a compulsive adulterer. He was to 20th century poetry what Lord Byron was to the 19th, making up in charisma what he lacked in scholarship. I suppose he was the last poet in our language to live like a rock star, and the last to be able to, despite a homely, decrepit appearance.

Here is a recording of him reciting his most famous poem:

His ride on the fame express didn't last long. Alcohol killed him before his 40th birthday.

You'd think there would be at least one great movie about the life he led from the end of WW2 until his death in 1953.

Unfortunately this isn't it.

This is a muddled historical romance about Dylan's salad days in the WW2 era. It incorporates Dylan and his wife into a fictional tapestry about a romantic quadrangle involving the two of them with Dylan's boyhood love (Keira Knightley) and her husband. The two women end up close friends, but everyone's life is complicated by the fact that Dylan seduces the ex-lover while her husband is off to war (apparently acting in the previous year's Keira Knightley movie, Atonement). When hubby returns, he's not happy to discover that he has risked his life so that his salary could provide Dylan Thomas with sex and booze.

The film picked up a bit of notoriety when Lindsay Lohan was originally cast as Dylan's Irish wife, and told everyone that her character's relationship with the Keira Knightley character had lesbian undertones. That turned out to be mostly inaccurate, although the two women do bathe together and there is a time when they disappear under the covers together, so it's not entirely missing from the subtext, but I'm pretty sure that they are just supposed to be best friends, and closer than sisters. (The do not kiss or embrace sexually.) At any rate, Lohan ultimately had to leave the project, and the purported lesbian activity was assigned to Sienna Miller, who did a fine job.

Indeed, everyone involved did a fine job. This literature-based chick-flick uses an army of talented people to evoke the styles and feel of another era (WW2), and is assembled by an excellent director and acted by a top-notch cast. Keira Knightley even sang quite well. But to what end?

To the screenwriter's credit, the film avoids romanticizing Dylan Thomas, portraying him fairly as a great talent who could also be a cowardly, jealous, small-minded sot, but I'll be damned if I can figure out why anybody wanted to make this film in the first place, or what the point was supposed to be. It all seems like "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Much like a lot of Dylan's poems.

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Sienna Miller had only a couple of single-frame nipple slips.

Film clip here, snaps below.

Keira Knightley, however, did quite a nice little love scene with The Scarecrow.

 Film clips here, collages below.