I Saw a Movie: Bright Star (2009)

Illustration from Randolph Caldecott's The Milkmaid, 1882

I have to admit that I don't know the work of New Zealand writer/director Jame Campion that well - certainly not well enough to have any expectations going into one of her films. But, being most familiar with The Piano among her works (like most people), I was both surprised and unsurprised by her new film Bright Star. Bright Star is period-romance/biopic about the last days of John Keats and his relationship with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, and it has Campion's trademark meditative pacing, impressive musical selections, and vivid visuals from its opening sequences - nothing surprising there. The thing that did catch me off-guard was Campion's interest in a love affair that is so outwardly chaste - not what I'd expected from a director known for talking Meg Ryan into getting naked and filming Kate Winslet urinating all over herself (not at the same time, obviously.)

Bright Star rises and falls on the rhythms of Fanny Brawne's heart - Fanny's a young girl obsessed with fashion who finds herself sharing a house with Keats and his prickly fellow poet Charles Armitage Brown. Fanny is portrayed as being quite young, although her age is never stated - a lot of things are never stated, actually, in the mostly-opaque storytelling here. We don't know much about the financial standing of Fanny's widow mother, or where Fanny gets the money for the materials she uses to sew all her amazing outfits, but the presentation of the story is such that you don't need to feel the need to question the historicity. We are looking into the very specific past of Fanny Brawne, and her portrayal by New Zealand TV actress Abbie Cornish provides much of Bright Star's emotional impact. Visually, Cornish is a combination of Katherine Heigl and Kristen Stewart, displaying the vacant openness of the former with the rodent-like squint of the latter, but she makes this look work and ably portrays the wide-eyed devotion of first love and the anguish of untimely loss.

I hope I didn't need to provide a SPOILER ALERT before alluding to the fact that John Keats dies at twenty-five. The shadow of this event stretches back to the film's earliest scenes, and Campion's script does a good job of balancing light and dark even as the film's tone grows increasingly claustrophobic. Much is made of the relationship dynamic between Fanny, Keats (played adequately by Ben Whishaw), and Charles Brown. Brown is played by US indie-film actor and Parks and Recreation cast-member Paul Schneider, and I was prepared to hate his performance. His accent was a little uneven, but his performance was quite good and a key part of the film. His character adds a much-needed tension to Bright Star - he's the best friend who may be putting his own interests ahead of his friend's.

Bright Star is not a real crowd-pleaser - it asks a lot of the audience without giving a lot back, but what it gives can be intimate and rewarding. Watching Fanny learn to inhabit the world of poetry as she falls in love with the poet is compelling, and every frame of the film is carefully composed with thoughtful use of color and light (kind of like Barry Lyndon). It's definitely a film that will get talked about more as Oscar season approaches, and it deserves to be talked about. On the surface, there's not a lot going on in Bright Star, but there are moments in this movie that suggest an immensity of things.

"Poet" by Sly & the Family Stone