★ 4 / 10
Bright Star is the rare biopic of an
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Bright Star is the rare biopic of an artist that actually provides some insight into its subject’s craft. Usually, a film about a writer, including such recent…
Bright Star is the rare biopic of an artist that actually provides some insight into its subject’s craft. Usually, a film about a writer, including such recent examples as To Olivia (Roald Dahl) and The Laureate (Robert Graves), will approach the creative process as 99-percent inspiration and 1-percent actual work – and sometimes not even that. Writing is taken as matter of course; poems come out straight out of the author’s mouth, fully formed like Athena emerging from Zeus’s forehead.
Bright Star doesn’t dismiss the notion of divine inspiration, but it does not tacitly take it for granted either; on the contrary, it acknowledges and articulates it (“If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it had better not come at all”). Moreover, even though it declares “Poetic craft is a carcass, a sham,” it does so perhaps out of modesty (after all, “A poet is not at all poetical. He is the most un-poetical thing in existence. He has no identity”), before diving right into the crux of the craft itself (“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery”).
This is all great stuff, and writer/director Jane Campion displays a sincere love for poetry with which she infuses her characters (who not only commit their favorite poems to memory, but can even recite verbatim from literary reviews). The problem is that her cast themselves are un-poetical and have no identity, and while this might serve them well in their poetic endeavors, as characters it renders them dull and unappealing; Ben Wishaw is wishy-washy as John Keats, and although credit is due Campion for not depicting him as a proto-rockstar (unlike, for instance, Leo DiCaprio’s Rimbaud in Total Eclipse), she loses many points for portraying Keats’s romantic interest Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) as a proto-groupie (early on, in order to impress him, she quotes some of Keats’s verses back to him, as if he weren’t familiar enough with his own work).
I’m aware that an artist’s love life, or lack thereof, tends to inform his creative output, but the romance between Wishaw and Cornish is so corny and mushy that we can’t believe such saccharine sentiment could ever translate into Keats’s sublime lyricism. Only Paul Schneider as the sardonic Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’s fellow poet, comes across as a sensible person who can tell the difference between poetry and real life; he starts out as boorish for the sake of boorishness, but he grows on us the more we realize that his contempt for the shallow Fanny is well-deserved (I especially enjoyed when he tricks her with a question about Paradise Lost’s non-existent rhymes).
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★ 6 / 10
Good performances from Cornish, Whishaw and Schneider for
Andres Gomez
Good performances from Cornish, Whishaw and Schneider for a folks and costums movie. You will enjoy it if you like the genre. If not ... well, probably it…
Good performances from Cornish, Whishaw and Schneider for a folks and costums movie.
You will enjoy it if you like the genre. If not ... well, probably it would be a slow and dull romantic drama for you.
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★ 8 / 10
A lovely movie, if not quite shining as brightly as it ought to have done
TheLittleSongbird
I got the DVD of Bright Star as a get well present while recovering in hospital from a major spinal operation recently. Looking at the cover, it looked like my…
I got the DVD of Bright Star as a get well present while recovering in hospital from a major spinal operation recently. Looking at the cover, it looked like my kind of movie, a romance and a period drama. Last Sunday, I watched it and was very impressed overall. It is a beautiful movie and competently directed and acted, but two things stop it from shining more than it could have done.One is some of the dialogue. Not all mind, most of it is wonderfully poetic and moving, but then there is some of the more abstract language that feels more stilted and not as feasible to understand. My main problem is the pace, which throughout is rather slow making one or two scenes in the middle act a tad dull.However, as a depiction of the joy of first love and the heart break that succeeds it, Bright Star is very effective. The final twenty minutes are heart-breaking, and the mood of the film compliments Keat's sensuous style beautifully. Jane Campion directs very competently, with each scene and season moving pretty much seamlessly to the next.Bright Star has a beautiful, moving story, beautifully told and tells the story of Keats, his love and his beautiful poetry lovingly. The film looks exquisite, with lovely photography and authentic costumes and the painterly, watercolour-like scenery is spellbinding. The music adds to the poignancy, the background scoring is effective without overpowering and I liked the use of the Mozart piece if not the arrangement and how it was performed, some of the singing lacked support and the piece works much more as a chamber work.The acting is fine and appropriately understated. Ben Whishaw is dashing and compellingly misty-eyed, while Paul Schneider adds a slight touch of menace and perhaps even realism to the picture. It was Abbie Cornish though who gave the best performance, one minute she is appropriately stern, another minute she is very poignant.All in all, a lovely movie, could have been more, but one movie I would see again willingly. 7.5/10 Bethany Cox
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