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Grade: A
Bright Star delivers a prismatic depiction — tart, funny and piercing — of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in the three years before he died, in 1821, at age 25.
It’s immediately refreshing in its unabashed flow of feeling, but it also wields a cumulative punch. It captures the power of poetry to convey thoughts and emotions that normally go beyond words. I knew
how well the film had worked its magic when I found myself choking up afterward, trying to put the movie’s cathartic resolution into language.
In Bright Star, the quiet between syllables has a sensory tingle to it. The moviemaking, like Keats’ verse, is alive to the play of lights, shadows and figures in a landscape. Subtly and expansively, it exploits the dynamism of movies to express a passion that must bridge distances as wide as a sea and as impermeable as a shared wall. Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown, and the Brawnes, at times lived within their own halves of the same house — but there’s nothing merely cute about it.
The writer-director, Jane Campion, drawing on Keats’ letters as well as his life story and poetry, depicts him as a pure lyric spirit. As he works his way through his confusions (especially about women), he’s true to his poetic faith that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." Although the film doesn’t paper over the cruelties writers commit in pursuit of their art or their defense of their own sensibilities, Campion’s Keats is fundamentally as moral as he is sensual. His conscience makes him reluctant to propose marriage to Brawne because he has no hope of supporting her.
He is mostly lucky in his friends, who support him, and even luckier in his moviemakers, who bring his story to life without a hint of affectation. Ben Whishaw locates the virility in reverie as Keats, and Abbie Cornish finds an inexhaustible well of pluck and passion in Brawne, a fashion-conscious seamstress. She responds to his transcendent soulfulness — and his sometimes obscure behavior — with a potent generosity all her own.
Brawne is the heart of the film, the one who allows us to share Keats’ imaginative flights. We come to see her as a woman who both inspires poetry and transmutes it back into living matter, especially when she turns her bedroom into a breeding-place for butterflies. Cornish, who earlier anchored Stop Loss with her empathetic grit, brings so much intuitive substance to the untutored Brawne that she becomes Keats’ perfect audience and spiritual receptor, as well as his love object and muse.
This movie renews the romance of idealized passion because it recognizes the doubts and hopes that hover around it — even in the poem "Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art," which expresses Keats’ desire to hear Brawne’s "tender-taken breath/And so live ever — or else swoon to death."
Around this couple’s enveloping swoon Campion sets a vibrant skein of family life and fraternity. Keats and his fellow artists are in their own traditional, manly ways renegade middle-class intellectuals. Amusing one another, caring for one another and offering security and sustenance to the desperate and homeless among them are not just matters of pleasure and devotion but of life and death. Brawne steps boldly into this tight-knit group. She seals her place in Keats’ heart when, after his tubercular brother dies, she presents the poet with an embroidered pillowcase on which to rest his loved one’s head.
Every Brawne makes his or her presence felt, including Kerry Fox as Fanny’s warm, worried mother, Thomas Sangster as her observant younger brother Sam, and Edie Martin as her kid sister, Toots, a sprite with the unactressy ebullience of the little girls in Jim Sheridan’s In America.
Best of all is Paul Schneider as Keats’ fiercely protective best friend, Charles Armitage Brown, who mistrusts Brawne, baits her, and flirts with her to expose her (he says) as a minx. Does he just want Keats’ companionship for himself? Schneider is equally upsetting and hilarious at the sort of confused proprietary bluster that can taint the selflessness of clannish men. And he’s emotionally harrowing when he realizes that he’s let down a friend. His climactic dignity is as haunting as Fanny’s resolute grief.
The triumph of Bright Star is that it gives its characters space to breathe and grow; it opens audiences up to mystery, just as Keats’ poetry does. An English professor friend in Austin recently passed along a quote from Philip Roth: "Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing." Campion’s Bright Star is a haunting romance and an act of cultural reclamation.
Bright Star delivers a prismatic depiction — tart, funny and piercing — of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in the three years before he died, in 1821, at age 25.
It’s immediately refreshing in its unabashed flow of feeling, but it also wields a cumulative punch. It captures the power of poetry to convey thoughts and emotions that normally go beyond words. I knew
how well the film had worked its magic when I found myself choking up afterward, trying to put the movie’s cathartic resolution into language.In Bright Star, the quiet between syllables has a sensory tingle to it. The moviemaking, like Keats’ verse, is alive to the play of lights, shadows and figures in a landscape. Subtly and expansively, it exploits the dynamism of movies to express a passion that must bridge distances as wide as a sea and as impermeable as a shared wall. Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown, and the Brawnes, at times lived within their own halves of the same house — but there’s nothing merely cute about it.
The writer-director, Jane Campion, drawing on Keats’ letters as well as his life story and poetry, depicts him as a pure lyric spirit. As he works his way through his confusions (especially about women), he’s true to his poetic faith that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." Although the film doesn’t paper over the cruelties writers commit in pursuit of their art or their defense of their own sensibilities, Campion’s Keats is fundamentally as moral as he is sensual. His conscience makes him reluctant to propose marriage to Brawne because he has no hope of supporting her.
He is mostly lucky in his friends, who support him, and even luckier in his moviemakers, who bring his story to life without a hint of affectation. Ben Whishaw locates the virility in reverie as Keats, and Abbie Cornish finds an inexhaustible well of pluck and passion in Brawne, a fashion-conscious seamstress. She responds to his transcendent soulfulness — and his sometimes obscure behavior — with a potent generosity all her own.
Brawne is the heart of the film, the one who allows us to share Keats’ imaginative flights. We come to see her as a woman who both inspires poetry and transmutes it back into living matter, especially when she turns her bedroom into a breeding-place for butterflies. Cornish, who earlier anchored Stop Loss with her empathetic grit, brings so much intuitive substance to the untutored Brawne that she becomes Keats’ perfect audience and spiritual receptor, as well as his love object and muse.
This movie renews the romance of idealized passion because it recognizes the doubts and hopes that hover around it — even in the poem "Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art," which expresses Keats’ desire to hear Brawne’s "tender-taken breath/And so live ever — or else swoon to death."
Around this couple’s enveloping swoon Campion sets a vibrant skein of family life and fraternity. Keats and his fellow artists are in their own traditional, manly ways renegade middle-class intellectuals. Amusing one another, caring for one another and offering security and sustenance to the desperate and homeless among them are not just matters of pleasure and devotion but of life and death. Brawne steps boldly into this tight-knit group. She seals her place in Keats’ heart when, after his tubercular brother dies, she presents the poet with an embroidered pillowcase on which to rest his loved one’s head.
Every Brawne makes his or her presence felt, including Kerry Fox as Fanny’s warm, worried mother, Thomas Sangster as her observant younger brother Sam, and Edie Martin as her kid sister, Toots, a sprite with the unactressy ebullience of the little girls in Jim Sheridan’s In America.
Best of all is Paul Schneider as Keats’ fiercely protective best friend, Charles Armitage Brown, who mistrusts Brawne, baits her, and flirts with her to expose her (he says) as a minx. Does he just want Keats’ companionship for himself? Schneider is equally upsetting and hilarious at the sort of confused proprietary bluster that can taint the selflessness of clannish men. And he’s emotionally harrowing when he realizes that he’s let down a friend. His climactic dignity is as haunting as Fanny’s resolute grief.
The triumph of Bright Star is that it gives its characters space to breathe and grow; it opens audiences up to mystery, just as Keats’ poetry does. An English professor friend in Austin recently passed along a quote from Philip Roth: "Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing." Campion’s Bright Star is a haunting romance and an act of cultural reclamation.
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