‘The beginning of your poem has something very perfect,” says John Keats’s lover, Fanny Brawne, of his Endymion — before complaining that the rest of it isn’t nearly as good.
In Bright Star Jane Campion tactfully allows us to understand that this is not so much a criticism of Keats’s poetry as of his life, in fact all our lives. They are finest at the beginning; careless youth is an Endymion moment, a blaze of perfection and rightness, destined to decay with adulthood’s compromises and responsibilities.
With this account of Keats’s love affair with Brawne, played by Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, Campion has made a fine and even ennobling film: defiantly, unfashionably about the vocation of romantic love. She has Whishaw and Cornish actually recite poetry — which, for most actors, is as difficult as walking on your hands or juggling knives — and even proposes a kind of secular martyrdom for them in the movie’s final act. Their love is murdered by the false choice between love and art and sacrificed to a petty tangle of money worries, social scruples and irrelevant male loyalties.
The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that Campion has neglected to acknowledge the primal force of sex or from those who feel their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, I think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion’s career, exposing The Piano as overrated and overegged.
Few films allow you to listen to the sounds of silence, or near silence, between the lines of dialogue: the sounds of birdsong, or the rustle of clothing, or footfalls in a country lane — but that is what Campion’s does. Her film proceeds at a quiet, measured tempo and with a lucid calm. Another type of film would have supercharged its narrative moments with surging music and the engine roar of dramatic acceleration, but Campion simply lets each scene unspool evenly. There is something coolly unobtrusive about her cinematic staging.
Cornish gives a wonderful performance as Brawne: the sensitive young woman who is intrigued and amused by the reputation of her neighbour, John Keats, but insistent on her own rival skills as a dressmaker and seamstress. Keats, as portrayed by Whishaw, has the self-possession of a middle-aged adult, the affected detachment of an artist and the eerie self-absorption of a child. But Brawne’s “meet-cute” — to use the classic Hollywood term — is not just with him; she also encounters Keats’s possessive and boorish best friend, Charles Brown, played by American actor Paul Schneider, with a Scottish accent that audiences may need to indulge a little. The same goes for his tartan waistcoat and trews.
Brown’s appearance in the story alerts us to the fact that this is a love triangle. Grumpy, cigar-smoking Brown is quite as in love with Keats as Brawne is. Desperate to maintain their fusty bachelor idyll together, idling, musing and writing, he is (justifiably) afraid that marriage will condemn his friend to poverty and exterminate his poetic gift.
For a while, Brawne penetrates the mystery of Keats’s world and their affair proceeds: their single kiss is ecstatic in that lost metaphysical sense. It is also very physical. But how can things proceed when Keats cannot afford to marry and is already married to his work? He is, moreover, very ill and his protective chorus of jealous critical admirers is never far away. Fearing another English winter for their hero, they club together to buy a ticket for him to travel to the healthier climes of Italy.
There’s no avoiding the dreadful sadness that descends on the film like a shroud, but even in the sadness there is a kind of euphoria, an ecstasy of loss. — © Guardian News & Media 2009