leave your impatience at the door and slip into a peaceful mood
On the way to see “Bright Star,” leave your impatience at the door and slip into
a peaceful mood. You will have lots of time for thinking while this movie
unfolds very, very slowly. As we might expect from writer/director Jane Campion,
the film is a beautiful sight, caught in the kind of light and color that seems
to have disappeared under the assault of fractured modern rhythms.
The film
unfolds in a small country house in Hampstead in pre-Victorian 1818. There lives
Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) with her daughter Fanny, another younger daughter and a
teenage son. Money is a major problem, alleviated just a little when the young
poet John Keats and his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider) become paying
borders in one half of the partitioned first floor.
Fanny (Abbie
Cornish) is a bright and quick witted young woman who abides by the conventions
of the day but whose mind is ready to take flight when she meets John Keats (Ben
Whishaw). Bound to home by custom, Fanny spends her time sewing her own clothes
with innovative stitching that would have served her well two centuries later.
Abbie Cornish endows Fanny with the inner pluck that so appealed to Keats, and
Ben Whishaw is appropriately gaunt and morose as his illness and death approach.
Campion
serves us well by not making a theatrical story even more so. We are spared
overblown melodrama. The tragedy of the youngest of the famed Romantic poets
dying at twenty-five stands alone, and Campion is wise to have him die far away
in Italy rather than in a deathbed scene in Hampstead. The director makes
another wise move in her handling of his poetry. Enthralled by Keats, Fanny
learns his poems, and, as she begins to recite them, quite wonderfully back to
him, he responds until both are using the poems as a quiet declaration of their
love.
It is a given
in a Campion film (think of “The Piano”) that she will dig deep in order to
convey time and place on film. A ritual afternoon tea offers a form of cup
drumming that must have been part of pre-Victorian fun. Keats’ friend Charles
cavorting as a self-proclaimed monkey in an embarrassing scene would be
irritating in any era.
For all the
drama of the Keats story, it is odd to feel that this movie moves nearly
intolerably slowly and feels tepid. And so there is that time to think. You can
think about beauty of light and landscape, of deaths of two young brothers
before medicine caught up, of what people did back then to distract themselves,
of how women were confined until they married, of how families spent their
candlelit evenings. And when you shake yourself back to the film, there will
still be Fanny and John Keats struggling with money problems and ill-fated love
without any knowledge that by twenty-five he had already written his legacy.
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