Skip to main content"I'm not sure I have the right feelings toward women," confesses John Keats to the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, as their lowercase romance stirs in the sitting parlors of Bright Star. This is a dangerous admission for the poet to make—not only because he doesn't have a lot of time to dither (what with ceasing upon the midnight and all) but also in light of the movie being directed by Jane Campion and advised by Andrew Motion, neither of whom has been inclined to be forgiving to men with the wrong feelings toward women. You will remember Campion as the director of The Piano, which had some strong opinions about the track record of the male gender. You will remember Motion, if you remember him at all, as the Philip Larkin biographer who made sure his fellow versifier's every sordid liaison was recorded with the suitable admonitory noises. But it turns out Campion and Motion have provided the Keats of Bright Star with nothing but the most honorable intentions. Even when Fanny, who is herself highly virtuous, pleads to consummate their relationship before her betrothed sails for the faint hope of an Italian climate, he begs off. In the film's portrait, John Keats apparently dies a proud virgin, like a tubercular Tim Tebow.
Bright Star exists at the crossroads where feminist politics meet old-fashioned purity, and they don't have sex. This, it turns out, is an incredibly smoldering place. The film is likely to be fairly admired by English professors and Oscar voters, but mark my words: It is going to become the unequaled favorite movie of homeschoolers in the girls' dormitories of evangelical colleges nationwide. It is the tasteful older sibling of Twilight, with John Keats as the new agonized, abstemious vampire boyfriend. Technically, Keats is not a vampire, but he's a literary immortal, and that's close enough (and probably classier). Plus, he dies, which is going to be an extremely popular decision. It makes the whole affair that much more deliciously painful.
As you may have gathered, all of this slightly annoys me, but I have to step back and admit Bright Star is very good at what it does. Ben Whishaw (who played one of the Bob Dylans in I'm Not There) doesn't make much of an impression as Keats—he's as wispy as the mustache he never quite succeeds in growing—but it's Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss) who is doing the hard toil here in the role of Fanny. She's the sexual initiator, the smitten pupil and the death-rebuking muse. (As Anthony Hecht once wrote, to be "addressed as a sort of mournful cosmic last resort is really tough on a girl," though Fanny doesn't seem to mind.) It's a tricky role—Fanny has to stand in for all the women shunted to the sidelines by patriarchy, without relinquishing any of her adoration for one man—and Cornish accomplishes it by balancing her characterization midway between wariness and vulnerability, as if constantly suspecting she's being mocked. Her chief antagonist, Keats' BFF Charles Armitage Brown, is played by Paul Schneider (All the Real Girls) with a Scottish burr and a sneering boys'-club jealousy. Dubious of Fanny's motives for poetry classes, Brown is saddled with every male defect Campion can write (at one point he gibbers like an ape), but Schneider is a healthy adversary for Cornish, and I found myself wishing the movie would pair them instead.
But that is not the picture we're dealing with. The actual Bright Star is much like the description a supporting character gives to Keats: "He is very quick with his thoughts, although now they're mostly sad." The movie's hothouse fervor (which is highly literal, with Fanny turning her bedroom into a makeshift butterfly terrarium) is sharpened by images that appear intoxicated by the crisp tingle of fall and spring air: the seasons that seem most exquisitely fleeting. Campion's camera jumps to unexpected sights—a sudden snow flurry, the eyes of a small child—and lingers in wonder; it is the closest a movie can come to duplicating the experience of idealizing, youthful love. I don't know if Bright Star is really interested in poetry, but it has the right feelings.
is rated PG. It opens Friday at Fox Tower.
WWeek 2015