In Theaters: Bright Star

As played by Abbie Cornish, in full, mischievous cheek, Brawne is simply a woman of strength and self-possession, aware of the absurdity of the limitations within which she must conduct herself, and brave enough to flaunt them anyway. Almost as compelling as the relationship between Keats and Fanny is the struggle she has with Keats's colleague, Charles Armitage Brown (played, in an extraordinary performance, by Paul Schneider). Brown is the kind of condescending, exclusive, reverse cock-blocking buddy that everyone who has ever been a girlfriend knows and despises.Desperate to diminish Fanny in his own and his friend's eyes, he behaves with a contempt born of jealousy; full of dick moves, Brown proves a disappointment even to the one he loves best, a realization that makes for one of the most bitterly heartbreaking scenes in a seriously swoony film.

If Campion set out to restore Brawne to personhood, she does the same, if not quite as well and from the opposite direction, for Keats. Whishaw, with his cherry lips, stripling frame and sad, sinking blue eyes, is almost too perfectly cast, and his comparative elusiveness and propensity for collapse makes for easy mythology. It is a great credit to the actor, who is saddled with numerous recitations, along with the afore-mentioned kitty-stroking, that Keats lives in the film as something other than the doomed genius. Cornish gives a strong, grounded performance; particularly in Fanny's interactions with her family--one of more tender, gracious portraits of period family life in memory--the contours of an otherwise softly sketched character are shown. She is, I daresay, as Keats would have her.

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