Review of Bright Star (2009) by Ryan M — 22 Jan 2010

Jane Campion's beautifully doomed romance story has the typical hallmarks of a costume drama that should get noticed by the Oscars. But unlike the exploitative-by-comparison "Atonement", "Bright Star" doesn't go for any easy payoffs for its audience sake and doesn't include a pointless 4 minute single take on a beach just for the hell of it: It sticks to the romance at the heart of the story and asks the audience for empathy rather than sympathy.

Fanny Brawne does plenty of sewing in her mum's house in 19th Century London and makes some nice money out of it, unlike Mr Brown (a fact Fanny states clearly to him at the start) who rents a room there, or his best friend John Keats who will die a financial failure but with time will become as loved by the public as he was by Fanny. But it took time for their romance to start, as Fanny didn't take to poetry until she read the words of John Keats and requested he teach it to her, while his interest in her increased after she showed her kindness to his dying brother. But as history teaches us, this was a doomed romance due to Keats' inability to make any serious money, ergo society dictated that he was unfit to support Fanny despite their love for each other.

As if society and money wasn't enough to prevent them from getting married, Mr Brown proved to be another wedge between the two (whether it was for Keats' own good or whether Brown had a thing for Brawne is unclear). Also a writer, he never had the sensuality of Keats and remained an ultimately cold individual too obssessed with his craft to allow love into his love, while Keats enjoyed tender and secret kisses with Brawne and eventually became a major chapter in the history of romantic poetry.

Because there has never been an ugly-looking costume drama, the verbal beauty of Keats' words are actually surpassed by the visual beauty of the picture (no small feat), with Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish proving to be a terrific pairing in the acting department, with society's supression of their love forcing them to put a damper on those emotions of theirs (the news of Keats death being revealed to Fanny would have been dealt with in a far more hysterical manner than Abbie adopted, which somehow made the scene even more upsetting). Special credit really should go to Paul Schneider for making Mr Brown quite an enigma in the end, and it was nice to see Kerry Fox (star of Campion's "An Angel At My Table") with a nice role as Fanny's mother. But this is Campion's story, and she mostly keeps to the historical facts and keeps the story quite conventional which suits it very well (Julian Schnabel's experimental "Before Night Falls" was an intriguing yet messy look at another poet's life). Her downplaying of the emotional aspect of the story turns this into a superior romance story and elevates this into one of the best films of 2009, proving that her Oscar and Palme D'or back in 1993 were not a "one-off".