Abbie Cornish looking to see if Ben Winshaw may have misplaced his acting ability in the flower bed.
Bright Star (2009)
Directed by Jane Campion
119 Minutes
**
It’s 1820, the peak of the Age of Romanticism—a great time to indulge in sentimental dreams. Spunky Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) is the elder daughter of down-on-its-heels gentry, and she’s busy supporting her patriarch-less family through her fancy needle and millinery work. She saves her most flamboyant outfits for visits to poet John Keats (Ben Wishaw), with whom she is hopelessly in love. Fanny is a metaphor for director Jane Campion’s film about the doomed Brawne/Keats relationship—all dressed up with nowhere to go. The film looks gorgeous, but it’s like the dishes you see on The Food Channel—heavily lacquered eye candy for the camera that’s devoid of nourishment.
If we judged films strictly on appearances, Jane Campion’s painterly Bright Star would be the most luminescent body in the heavens. There are individual shots that are as beautiful as anything we’ve seen on the screen in years: Keats lying atop a tree aburst in pink blossoms, verdant green hillsides, the Brawne siblings dressed in muted colors frolicking in beds of purple flowers …. In a similar vein, it’s hard to take your eyes off Cornish as she sashays across the screen in one quirky outfit after another. We’ll applaud all of the cinematography and costume awards this film wins, but ultimately this is a film that looks good but isn’t. When your leading man is out-acted by a cat, casting is problematic to say the least.
John Keats died of consumption when he was just twenty-five. You’ll need to remind yourself that Keats was a Romantic poet, because Wishaw plays him with all the passion of a Fed-Ex delivery man. He telegraphs the coming tragedy by spending the entire movie walking about doe-eyed, stubble-faced, and dazed, as if he’s wondering what to do next. Acting lessons might be a good idea. Wishaw lacks the gravitas to be convincing as a tortured writer, the animation to be a lover, and the articulation to bring Keats’ poetry to life. We are supposed to believe that Keats is tortured by his attraction to Brawne, but there’s more latent homosexual frisson between Wishaw and his poet friend Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider) than there is spark between leading man and leading lady. When Keats pours out fiery verse allegedly inspired by Brawne we wonder if he has an off-screen body double doing his wooing.
None of this is the fault of newcomer Abbie Cornish. She is superb as the strong-willed Brawne. She nearly carries Campion’s weak screenplay all on her own, using her solid body and round face to express far more than was written. She is especially stellar when paired with an actor worthy of her ability. The film’s best scenes are between her and Schneider as they convey their icy, controlled contempt for one another. The film’s other revelation is Edie Martin, a red-haired sprite who plays younger sister “Toots.” She’s adorable and affecting as she flits about holding Topper, her cat, who is way more charming than Winshaw.
Campion’s screenplay is essentially a variant of her 1993 masterpiece The Piano. That film worked because it had top-drawer acting throughout, because all of the external trappings were intrinsically interesting in their own right, and because Campion made all the small details cohere. That’s not the case in Bright Star. Take, for example, the film’s confusing portrayal of social class. The family is supposedly as poor as a church mouse, but there seems to be money for Fanny to attend fancy dress balls, several servants are in attendance, and the family table is a veritable groaning board of roasts, steaming tureens of vegetables, and sticky sweets. The Brawne family matriarch (Kerry Fox) is snootily forbidding Fanny’s courtship of the penniless Keats at one moment, and condoning an engagement of convenience the next. Similarly, we find her looking down her nose at the hired help in one scene and dropping her affected aristocratic open vowels and conversing with domestics as an equal in the next. These shifts occur mostly to serve the script, not logic. In like fashion, scenes set in London’s working-class squalor are so overdone that they look like histrionic made-for-TV versions of A Christmas Carol.
Critics have been nearly universal in praise of this film. Apparently they are in rare company—box office receipts fell by 74% in its second week, the opposite of how “art house films” generally track. We understand why—word of mouth on the film’s shortcomings has caused Bright Star to go supernova.
Directed by Jane Campion
119 Minutes
**
It’s 1820, the peak of the Age of Romanticism—a great time to indulge in sentimental dreams. Spunky Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) is the elder daughter of down-on-its-heels gentry, and she’s busy supporting her patriarch-less family through her fancy needle and millinery work. She saves her most flamboyant outfits for visits to poet John Keats (Ben Wishaw), with whom she is hopelessly in love. Fanny is a metaphor for director Jane Campion’s film about the doomed Brawne/Keats relationship—all dressed up with nowhere to go. The film looks gorgeous, but it’s like the dishes you see on The Food Channel—heavily lacquered eye candy for the camera that’s devoid of nourishment.
If we judged films strictly on appearances, Jane Campion’s painterly Bright Star would be the most luminescent body in the heavens. There are individual shots that are as beautiful as anything we’ve seen on the screen in years: Keats lying atop a tree aburst in pink blossoms, verdant green hillsides, the Brawne siblings dressed in muted colors frolicking in beds of purple flowers …. In a similar vein, it’s hard to take your eyes off Cornish as she sashays across the screen in one quirky outfit after another. We’ll applaud all of the cinematography and costume awards this film wins, but ultimately this is a film that looks good but isn’t. When your leading man is out-acted by a cat, casting is problematic to say the least.
John Keats died of consumption when he was just twenty-five. You’ll need to remind yourself that Keats was a Romantic poet, because Wishaw plays him with all the passion of a Fed-Ex delivery man. He telegraphs the coming tragedy by spending the entire movie walking about doe-eyed, stubble-faced, and dazed, as if he’s wondering what to do next. Acting lessons might be a good idea. Wishaw lacks the gravitas to be convincing as a tortured writer, the animation to be a lover, and the articulation to bring Keats’ poetry to life. We are supposed to believe that Keats is tortured by his attraction to Brawne, but there’s more latent homosexual frisson between Wishaw and his poet friend Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider) than there is spark between leading man and leading lady. When Keats pours out fiery verse allegedly inspired by Brawne we wonder if he has an off-screen body double doing his wooing.
None of this is the fault of newcomer Abbie Cornish. She is superb as the strong-willed Brawne. She nearly carries Campion’s weak screenplay all on her own, using her solid body and round face to express far more than was written. She is especially stellar when paired with an actor worthy of her ability. The film’s best scenes are between her and Schneider as they convey their icy, controlled contempt for one another. The film’s other revelation is Edie Martin, a red-haired sprite who plays younger sister “Toots.” She’s adorable and affecting as she flits about holding Topper, her cat, who is way more charming than Winshaw.
Campion’s screenplay is essentially a variant of her 1993 masterpiece The Piano. That film worked because it had top-drawer acting throughout, because all of the external trappings were intrinsically interesting in their own right, and because Campion made all the small details cohere. That’s not the case in Bright Star. Take, for example, the film’s confusing portrayal of social class. The family is supposedly as poor as a church mouse, but there seems to be money for Fanny to attend fancy dress balls, several servants are in attendance, and the family table is a veritable groaning board of roasts, steaming tureens of vegetables, and sticky sweets. The Brawne family matriarch (Kerry Fox) is snootily forbidding Fanny’s courtship of the penniless Keats at one moment, and condoning an engagement of convenience the next. Similarly, we find her looking down her nose at the hired help in one scene and dropping her affected aristocratic open vowels and conversing with domestics as an equal in the next. These shifts occur mostly to serve the script, not logic. In like fashion, scenes set in London’s working-class squalor are so overdone that they look like histrionic made-for-TV versions of A Christmas Carol.
Critics have been nearly universal in praise of this film. Apparently they are in rare company—box office receipts fell by 74% in its second week, the opposite of how “art house films” generally track. We understand why—word of mouth on the film’s shortcomings has caused Bright Star to go supernova.
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