I don’t smoke. I don’t like smoking. But I don’t like moves to ban smoking in movies, either. Smoking is a sad fact of life, as our president will attest, and to erase it, particularly from period films that predate our ubiquitous cancer warnings, is to eliminate part of the cultural record.

Then again, if The Edge of Love were to be rated solely on its smoking content (as the nicotine police would do) it would get at least an NC-37. This is cigarette porn at its most shameless, with the ruby-red lips of co-stars Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller exploding into close-up plumes of exotic blue smoke at the start of every chapter stop. Granted, it’s England, in the blitz, where a quick fag or two to steady the nerves was less harmful than a German rocket. But the director, John Maybury (who worked with Knightley on The Jacket), and the cinematographer, Jonathan Freeman, really zero in on these two “smokin’” babes—realizing, perhaps, that there’s not much else to fix on in the script, by Knightley’s playwright mother, Sharman Macdonald (The Winter Guest).

The disc includes the film’s useless trailer. It’s one of those silent previews, except for ambient noise and bits of score, and the tagline, “The only thing more dangerous than love is…war.” If you’re going to attract a more rarified audience—this was never going to play multiplexes—you might want to clue them in that the film is based, albeit loosely, on an episode in the life of Dylan Thomas, ably portrayed by Welch-born Brothers & Sisters co-star Matthew Rhys. Poets are all the rage in biopics this year, if that staid genre can be said to have a rage: Federico Garcia Lorca’s relationship with Salvador Dali was the focus of the quickly extinguished Little Ashes, and James Franco is playing Allen Ginsberg in Howl. Marketing-wise, you can’t accuse this one of riding the trend into the ground. (more…)