Written and directed by Jane Campion, the director of The Piano, Bright Star tells the story of the tragic romance between the 23-year-old poet John Keats (played by Ben Whishaw) and the 18-year-old girl next door, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). The story is set in the London of 1818. The Brawne family are neighbours of friends who have Keats and his patron and protector, Mr Brown (Paul Schneider), renting out part of the house. As soon as Fanny meets Keats, she is intrigued by him; having read his poetry, she starts to pursue him.
Their romance is conducted against a backdrop of confining obstacles: sickness, geographical separation and social expectations. The most entertaining of them is Mr Brown, who regards Fanny as a floozy who threatens the future of his talented friend. Meanwhile, Fanny's family fear that any romance with the penniless Keats will threaten her chance of a happy marriage.
Bright Star is not your typical biopic of a celebrated poet and his muse. Keats may be the big name, but Fanny is the Bright Star through whose eyes the film is told. At first glance, with her passion for sewing and fashion, she may seem too frivolous to be a typical Campion neofeminist heroine, battling against the restrictions of her society - but she is. Campion wants us to admire this mouthy miss, who is not afraid to take on Keats and Brown with withering put-downs. She tells them her stitching has "more merit and admirers" than their "two scribblings" combined. And "I can make money out of it". They are impressed, and we're meant to think: "What a sassy, modern girl." To me, she sounds like a style-obsessed fashionista.
Campion wants Fanny to have merit of her own, not merely to be the great woman behind the great man. So she is portrayed as the emotional rebel who refuses to play by the rules. Marrying a poor poet is not an option for a nice, middle-class girl, but, as she says to her anxious mother: "You taught me to love - you didn't say only the rich." When it comes to matters of the heart, she is the warrior and he is the wimp.
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With Keats, Campion turns the stereotype of the Romantic poet on its head. He is the conformist who accepts society's belief that it would be wrong for Fanny to marry a poet without future prospects. There's something wet and passive about this Keats. When the tearful Fanny asks why he can't cancel his journey to Italy, he tells her it's because his friends have already bought the ticket. What kind of Romantic poet puts the price of a boat ticket before true love? Campion wants us to believe that the couple are victims of society's constraints and expectations, but it is the emotional cowardice of Keats that is the unacknowledged problem.
The screenplay, though inspired by the poet's work, his letters to Fanny and the Andrew Motion biography of Keats, hardly does him justice. Here, he is all sweetness and light - when he's not all moping and mourning - but the real Keats was far more cruel, manipulative and, at times, ambivalent about Fanny. Writing about her in an 1819 letter to his brother George, he criticises her nostrils ("a little painful"), her mouth ("bad and good"), her profile ("better than full face"), her feet ("tolerable"), and her behaviour ("monstrous"). He dismisses her outspokenness as an attempt to "appear stylish", adding: "I however tired of such stylishness and shall decline any more of it."
Still, it isn't easy to make a film about the doomed romance between a sick Romantic poet and the girl next door without resorting to irony or cliché. Campion has managed it by having faith in the power of his poetry and letters - which we get via voice-overs - and by coming up with outstanding poetic images of her own. My favourite is when we see Fanny lie down on her bed in a kind of ecstatic swoon as the curtain billows up, suggesting how she is being uplifted by his love. And there is no doubting the brilliance of Cornish's nuanced performance, the best of the year so far. Whishaw looks the part, but never has the presence or energy, even when in love, of Schneider's Mr Brown.
Ultimately, I don't think that Campion's pairing will end up alongside other great lovers of the cinema such as Romeo and Juliet, or Katie and Hubbell from The Way We Were. We never really get intimate with them because, even during the rare moments when they are not under the watchful eyes of family or friends, they aren't really intimate with each other. Their kisses are chaste, their conversations reserved. They speak in the Morse code of forbidden love, the dots and dashes of glances and flickering eyes. Bright Star is an admirable film made by a superb craftsman, but for me, Campion fails to deliver the big emotional punch she hopes to land.
PG, 119 mins