Two stars
Rated PG for brief language, thematic elements, some sensuality and incidental smoking
One hour, 59 minutes
“Bright Star” tells the story of 19th-century English poet John Keats’ unconsummated love affair with his neighbor, Fanny Brawne, which obsessed them both for the last several years of Keats’ short life (he died of consumption at 25).
Oddly, though, the most persuasive relationships in New Zealand writer/director Jane Campion’s movie are the ones between Fanny (Abbie Cornish), her mother (Kerry Fox) and Fanny’s adorable little sister (Edie Martin). Their affection for each other looks natural and unforced. Keats’ and Fanny’s? Not so much.
When the two first meet, Fanny is an outspoken, flirtatious 18-year-old more interested in her clothes (which she designs and sews herself) than in the moody poet busy nursing his mortally ill brother. However, an attraction soon forms, though Keats’ good friend and sometime housemate Charles Brown (Paul Schneider) violently opposes it and treats Fanny rudely. Fanny, ignorant about poetry, arranges to take lessons with Keats, providing an opportunity for him to read several of his great poems aloud (more poems are recited throughout the film, one of its highlights, together with the lovely English scenery).
But until later in the film, the romance feels more like a teenage crush — Keats himself is only 23, after all — than a mature passion. There’s little chemistry between Cornish and Ben Whishaw’s Keats. Matters aren’t helped by the director’s decision on how to depict the poet. With his shaggy coiffure and unvarying two-day growth of stubble, Whishaw looks more like a GQ model than the author of “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and (yes) “Bright Star.”
Fanny’s appearance poses a different problem. She’s an accomplished seamstress, but given the time required to hand-sew the voluminous, ruffled garments of the era, no one person would have been able to create the number of outfits — a different one in every scene! — that she’s shown in.
We know how the story ends. A postscript on the screen tells us that Fanny “wandered the moors for many years.” What it doesn’t tell us is that she eventually married and had three children.
“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art,” indeed.
