By Elliot Boswell
There is a moment in Jane Campion's new movie when a young John Keats, seated in a sunlit orchard, hears the mournful chimes of a nightingale from somewhere in the arborage above him. This being the summer when he wrote the six greats odes which would make him canonical, it is a moment freighted with symbolism, and one that also speaks to the lovely accidents of artistic inspiration.
The film, "Bright Star," which hit a limited number of theaters in late September and is only just now settling upon Portland, has numerous such occurrences. It's a love story and a lit story, shot with an often-florid tenderness, that makes you wonder why more like it don't come along, and when they do, why most aren't nearly as successful or poignant as Campion's most recent effort is.
The year is 1818. Keats (Ben Whishaw) has just experienced his first taste of the world of publishing (though it's a bitter one), and he moves with his friend and collaborator Charles Brown (Paul Schneider) into a house in Hampstead, part of the Greater London area. There he meets Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a witty, fashion-conscious seamstress who lives with her mother and two younger siblings in a separate part of the house. It isn't love at first sight, but the two are quickly subsumed by a passionate and ultimately doomed affair: Keats contracts tuberculosis, leaves for warmer climates, and dies in Rome at the age of 25.
The Keats tragedy is fairly common knowledge, which guts the narrative of any suspense that it might otherwise milk out of such a pair of star-crossed lovers. What we are left with, then, is how their story transpired, and especially how it prompted in him the poetry it did.
We've all seen movies about writers, and such works almost invariably stumble when it comes to actually working the writing part into the screen presentation. Too often, it goes something like this: "Gee, what's that you're working on there?" "Well, shucks, now that you ask ..." Moments like the above are so obviously contrived and hokey that we'd almost rather sacrifice the literary part for an unembarrassing, coherent storyline, so it's a great testament to Campion's own artistry and skill that she manages to fit in so much of Keats's verse in such a natural fashion.
In no small part, "Bright Star" achieves this by depicting Keats' and Brawne's relationship as one sparked by, and ultimately expressed in, his work. (The two cannot marry, for as Brawne's mother constantly reminds her, he has no income and no family crest.) She meets him at a party, and shortly thereafter, finds herself smitten by his famous opening line to "Endymion," - "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" - but is otherwise unimpressed. He sees in her that thing of beauty, and the two while away their ravishing summer afternoons canoodling, trying out his poetry on each other and falling increasingly in love.
Whishaw (better known as Arthur Rimbaud in "I'm Not There") is near-perfectly cast as Keats, for he looks like the most poetical of poets - handsome, brooding, shy and eloquent - and plays him with a haunted sensitivity that resonates profoundly with the misfortunes of his subject's life. The movie, however, belongs to Cornish, whose careful veneer of flirtation and independence gradually dissolves in the face of her consuming passion, his poverished consumption and their poetic consummation; the scene in which she hears of his passing is a ravaging one. "You taught me to love," she tells her mother. "You never said, 'Only the rich.'"
Appropriately, Campion shoots her film in a cinematically Keatsian style, sincere but not sentimental, lingering on bluebells and meadows, yet is unafraid, when his health begins to fail and the story turns more desperate, to present us with Drearye Olde England: the incessant, aggressively-misting rain, the squalor and clamor of London. The visuals become, alternately, a little Dickensian.
Re-reading this, I fear that I may have made the film sound slightly mannered or clichéd, like one of those interminable Austen adaptations, but what finally dooms the couple is not social class but literal, upper-case Death. At the age of ten, Keats lost his mother to TB, then, in a particularly ominous scene in "Bright Star," his younger brother to the same illness. He wrote in a letter that he felt as though he was living a "posthumous existence," and probably knew that he had caught his death of cold when he coughed blood onto Brawne's sheets.
But "Bright Star" triumphs most, I think, in juxtaposing the contemporary indifference towards Keats's work - indeed, his own huge doubts - and the majesty we see in it nearly 200 years later. Both the greatest irony and greatest tragedy of his short life is that he died without ever seeing his brilliance validated in the eyes of the public, and we are left wondering whether art or life is the more fickle one.
