Top Celebrity News
Review: Bright Star
Katherine Monk
Jane Campion directs Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in this period story based on the romance between Fanny Brawne and romantic poet John Keats. It's not perfect by any stretch, but the movie acknowledges the human fallibility factor in every moment, excusing its own sins while reaffirming the beauty and comfort of the simple flaws that shape experience.
Starring: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw and Paul Schneider
Rating: Three and a half stars out of five
Flourish your quills and grab an ink pot, everybody. Poetry is sexy again.
So what if it's been waiting in the mouldy wings for the past century or so? Waify males with anemic complexions and girlish hands have been ditched in favour of the George Clooneys for far too long.
When you think about it, it's kind of miraculous a movie such as Bright Star even got made in this day of dwindling budgets and sinking intellectual standards.
A period tale about the real-life connection between 18-year-old Fanny Brawne and poet John Keats, Bright Star is all about love -- real, hardcore romantic love, not the sappy, cloying brand of store-bought love typically shilled by the studios in a movie starring Jennifer Aniston.
Set in the early 1800s, Jane Campion's new movie enters a world where people talk a lot -- but not everything can be said.
For young Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), figuring out the rules of the conversational road has been something of a challenge. She's outspoken for a girl of her era, and despite her good looks and quick mind, she makes the men around her shrivel with fearful desire.
Fanny is a firebrand, but there is one man who seems able to meet her body and brain without getting burned, and it's John Keats (Ben Whishaw).
It was Fanny who supposedly inspired the very best work Keats ever composed, and in this filmed recreation based on the love letters he wrote for Fanny while dying of tuberculosis in Rome, director Campion (The Piano, Sweetie) explores the fertile territory of muse and creator, as well as the throbbing pulse of first love.
Told in Campion's signature spare style, where the viewer is given ample time to simply drink in the textures and subtle contrasts of each beautifully composed frame, Bright Star's internal clockwork is synchronized to a different time altogether.
In fact, you can almost hear the hollow tick-tock of the analog mechanism echoing in the background for the duration because underlying this entire romance is the undeniable reality of death.
Keats died at 25 and most viewers will be aware of this tragic ending, but Campion doesn't try to disguise the narrative tracks in the hopes of seducing us into escapist fantasy.
To her credit, she creates a very believable world where death is in plain view and becomes a palpable part of everyday life.
It's an important element in the dramatic diagram because death, even more than a lack of money, becomes the ultimate obstacle between John and Fanny.
That said, melodrama lurks behind every corner, and under every brocade tablecloth because it's not just a Romeo and Juliet formula at work here, but a Victorian tragedy waiting to be unlaced.
Of course, to sell the romance, there has to be chemistry between the two leads. And while co-stars Cornish and Whishaw seem to like each other, there's a sad lack of readable desire between them. Cornish is spectacular in the role of the strong-willed woman willing to sacrifice it all in the name of love, but Whishaw disappears when they share the frame.
The young actor has great talents, but he has no screen presence -- despite his pink lips and pale face -- and his weakness as a leading man drains the movie of dramatic fuel: what should have been a conflagration of love, lust and youthful impulse simply smoulders as it seeks an ignition spark.
As it stands, Bright Star still has a lot going for it -- namely a true story that immerses us in a specific time and place, and lets us rediscover the thrills of poetry as well as the potential of cinematic romance.
It's not perfect by any stretch, but the movie acknowledges the human fallibility factor in every moment, excusing its own sins while reaffirming the beauty and comfort of the simple flaws that shape experience.
