“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its lovliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
-- John Keats, A Thing of Beauty (Endymion)

Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish in Apparition's Bright Star

At 23-years of age, poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) is not a success. His latest effort Endymion has not met with either critical or public acclaim, and while best friend Mr. Brown (Paul Schneider) remains certain people will ultimately see his fellow writer’s genius the young man isn’t nearly as positive.

Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) is not a fan of poetry or of the written word. She is an outspoken student of fashion, designing clothes unlike those worn by any other fashionable 18-year-old woman in London. She appreciates quick wit and enjoys a good verbal joust, unimpressed by literature and doesn’t understand why a person of quality would dare pursue it.

But Fanny cannot help but be moved by John’s apparent devotion to his sickly younger brother Tom (Olly Alexander) while he is in turn moved by her heartfelt efforts to provide him some assistance. Soon the pair strikes up a pleasant friendship, but when Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) moves her family into the same house where Mr. Brown and Mr. Keats maintain their own residence things quickly escalates between the couple. Soon their romance begins to overpower everything else, and while everyone around them knows it cannot last Fanny and John become positive their love will last the remainder of their lifetimes.

Writer and director Jane Campion’s Bright Star, her first film since 2003’s abysmal In the Cut, is a glorious return to form for the Oscar-winning (The Piano, Best Original Screenplay) New Zealand auteur. Based on Keats’ own letters and a variety of biographical works, the movie is on the surface a rather simplistic and straightforward love story.  But Campion delves deeper than that, her drama a spectacularly multilayered and complex coming of age saga of genius unleashed and the price of handing over your heart to it.

The film in many ways is itself a poem. It is filled with its own stanzas, its own rhymes, its own phrasings, each transition a moment for a change in alliteration or cadence. Cinematographer Greig Fraser’s (the upcoming The Boys Are Back) camera glides with shimmering simplicity, while composer Mark Bradshaw’s score cuts in and out like an elegant accent hiding atop an important syllable.

The actors play into this as well. Both Cornish and especially Whishaw deliver superb performances, both of them playing one off the other as if she were anapest and he were dactyl and together they had found some way to put aside their differences in order to blissfully coexist. It is as if in the pair’s coming together they have found a familiar consonance, just the sight one of the other enough to provoke a repetition of emotional responses that almost can’t help but build into something eternal and timeless.

It almost goes without saying that thanks to Campion’s take on things there is a supremely measured pacing to the narrative structure that some will undoubtedly find more than a bit slow.  The filmmaker also seems to take for granted that audiences are going to be perfectly okay with the fact that she only paints the dynamics of Fanny’s family in the simplest of brushstrokes, a turn of the head or a finger sweeping a loose hair from the face all that’s required to understand just how deep their familial bonds go.

For my part, I was fine with this take on the subject matter on the filmmaker’s part. I tend to find more can be said with a doting smile or a sincere embrace than pages of dialogue are ever able to duplicate. I appreciated the leisurely pace, was happy Campion took her time to explore the young couple’s relationship treating with the value and the respect it deserved. 

If anything, my only complaint is with the way historical fact intrudes upon my own romantic fantasies. Keats life is not a mystery, and while I’m not going to say exactly what happens I will say there was a moment when Fanny’s pain essentially became my own. And yet, like the author’s elegiac prose, I was so captivated by both the film and this relationship my pain gave way to dreamy euphoria. Bright Star isn’t just a superlative achievement, for director Campion it might just be her best work yet.

Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)  

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