"Under Milk Wood" (Guardian 30/10/15)

Under Milk Wood **

Dir: Kevin Allen. With: Rhys Ifans, Charlotte Church, Julian Lewis Jones, Lisa Palfrey. 87 mins. Cert: 15

Is it significant that, in Dylan Thomas’s centenary year, more effort has been made to dramatise the life – A Poet in New York on TV, Set Fire to the Stars in cinemas – than the work? On the plus side, Kevin Allen’s new take on Thomas’s great radio fantasia of 1954 – emerging in simultaneously shot English- and Welsh-language versions, with Charlotte Church singing torch songs as Llareggub’s town sweetheart Polly Garter – proves more rooted in place, and less literal-minded than its 1972 Burton-Taylor predecessor, a project born of a vanity denied the begrimed, dishevelled character actors gathered here.

Still, it soon becomes apparent Allen hasn’t the sweeping vision or budget to deliver anything more than eccentric odds and ends. Only early on, with the trippy, seaweed-strewn memories of Rhys Ifans’ Captain Cat, does it find anything like a cinematic analogue to the text’s pagan strangeness; elsewhere, it assumes the air of a strained community theatre project, nudging and winking its way around anything remotely phallic. Decking out local battleaxe Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard (Buddug Verona James) in S&M gear recalls Allen’s spirited work on 1997’s Twin Town and TV’s Benidorm, but also typifies the reduction of a lusty poetry to baser, end-of-the-pier ribaldry.

Time and again, you catch all those behind the camera overcompensating for the absence of any unifying idea: production designer Marie Lanna stuffing every frame with doll parts and dildos, cinematographer Andy Hollis turning somersaults with his camera in a bid to keep up with the dexterity of the language. As the effort cuts against any considered appreciation of the text, suspicion grows that the material cannot function in this medium: where the words power ahead, unbowed by time, the images – here either manic and gurning, or hamstrung by their poverty-row origins – simply cower in their wake.

Under Milk Wood opens in selected cinemas from today.