Bright Star (**1/2)

I have a confession. I don’t really like poetry. (Dirty limericks don’t count, do they?) Poetry is about saying things prettily or interestingly, and I’ve always preferred saying them directly. I know, I’m a Philistine, but there it is. So I will summarize this entire movie succinctly. Poor poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw, of Brideshead Revisited) dies young, but not before falling passionately in love with Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a middle-class seamstress. Now, if you like poetry, there is plenty in the movie, actual Keats poems recited by both major characters, and metaphorical, visual poetry provided by director Jane Campion (The Piano), who also wrote some modestly intelligent dialogue.

The setting is England around 1820, but for once an English period piece is not dominated by considerations of class, costumery, and social convention, although there is the practical matter of money, of which Keats has nearly none. His friend and near-constant companion, who is only called Mr. Brown, is his main benefactor. Whether because of American Paul Schneider’s surprisingly good performance or because the character injects the only elements of both humor and real discord into the film, I found Mr. Brown more compelling than the leads. (Fanny, finding him crude, instantly detests him, and he delights in goading her.) Other characters, who are primarily the Brawne family, keep mostly to the background. The movie, as a whole, keeps to its subject, the romance. Of Keats’s early life, of English society at the time, of the larger movement of the Romantic poets, there is little. It is true, however, that Keats was somewhat apart from society, and not widely regarded in his lifetime. Also, the movie is told more from Fanny’s point of view.

The last half, in which circumstances conspire to pull the couple apart, is well done, but would have had more impact had not the establishing scenes of the romance seemed so dry. Full of longing and weeping and the pain of separation, but not so much of the stuff that shows us what falling in love is actually about, Campion’s film will certainly appeal to those who care for its focus on thwarted desire rather than desire itself. But for me it was not the tearjerker that, given the outlines of the plot, it should have been, although Abbie Cornish herself is a pro at crying, and at those moments I couldn’t be but moved.

IMDB link

viewed 10/6/09 at Ritz East and reviewed 10/8/09