In Bright Star, Jane Campion conjures a nineteenth century world into which many of us would happily slip: people behave beautifully, dress carefully, spend afternoons dancing minuets and evenings perfecting their harmonies, quote poetry to each other with complete unselfconsciousness, and fall in love like absolute champions. Aside from non-existent plumbing and the mortal threat posed by everything short of a hangnail, it's positively idyllic. Keatsian, even.
Settling instead for inhabiting the world of the film is an easy bargain: against tall odds, Campion manages to tell the story of the love affair struck between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his neighbor, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) -- itself steeped in twin traditions of the class-conscious costume drama and literary bio-pic -- as though it has never been told before. Even when she does hack at some old, saw-bitten log, the cut comes fresh: Campion can't seem to resist that signature, period expression of sublimated desire, the kitty-stroking shot, but I swear to god it's the most marvelously poignant kitty-stroking shot you'll ever see. Same goes for the reveal of the tubercular Keats's inevitably blood-soaked linens.
Campion has clearly drunk deep of Keats's poetry, and her script admirably balances wit, restraint, and liberal call-and-response quotations with pocket symposiums on what a poem should do. "A poem needs understanding through the senses," Keats advises Fanny, comparing it to immersion in a lake -- an experience to be felt, not necessarily thought about. The script's reverence for words in their proper place translates two ways, the second leaving plenty of room for the grandeur of silence, and the visual phrase. As the bond between Fanny and Keats strengthens in the face of its impossibility (him being an orphan of no account, her the family's hope for a lucrative marriage), their interactions, fraught with improbably naturalistic swings between ease and tension, are divided by images of the couple in their own domains, separated but swimming though each other's thoughts: a shot from Fanny's window of Keats on the grass is rhymed later with her on the other side of the glass, looking in. A simple profile of her reclining, fully clothed, onto her narrow, white bed becomes a brief ode to luxuriating, alone, in some recent bliss.
For while Campion has clearly been impressed by Keats's aesthetic and his short life (he died, at 25, in a small room in Rome, which is now a very creepy and affecting museum), she doesn't generally make films about men, and this one is no different: the Bright Star of the title, and the subject of Keats's poem of the same name, is Fanny Brawne. Having suffered from her reputation as "promiscuous" (what hanky-swapping heights of depravity that word suggested in 1820, I can only imagine), Brawne was reviled for publishing Keats's letters to her after his death, a collection now treasured by his devotees and scholars.
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.