Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
A Joy Forever
(Bright Star, 10/13/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
In
such films as The Piano and Portrait of a Lady, New Zealander
Jane Campion has managed to strike an interesting balance. Although
she has worked the well-trod paths of the lush, Masterpiece Theatre-style
costumier, she has consistently managed to defy our programmed expectations
of such dramas. The result has often made us see the stories and the
settings in fresh, even enthralling ways. She tends to get about a hundredth
the press of her countryman—the guy who made Lord of the Rings—but
we get the feeling critics a hundred years from now will still be interpreting
Campion when Peter Jackson is a historical footnote.
Her latest, Bright Star,
just may be the most romantic movie you will ever see. I mean this is
both the common and the historical sense of the word "romantic."
It is, like the poetry of John Keats, steeped in the dignity of human
feeling, and it's also the kind of movie that will make you want to
fall in love with somebody because—well, just because. Abbie
Cornish stars as Fanny Brawne, the heart-and-soulmate of Keats (Perfume's
Ben Whishaw), whose relationship with the poet was cut cruelly short
by Keats' death at the tender age of 25. The entire movie is essentially
the fitful unfolding of their love, which was bitterly opposed by Keats'
frenemy Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider) and economically unrealistic
for both.
Though its subject is antique and
literary, Campion brings a visual sense to the film that seems as fresh
as the first crocus in spring. Her script makes literal the romantic
metaphor linking nature and the heart—Fanny and Keat's love buds,
blooms, and dies in the course of the seasons. Along the way there are
images that are heartrendingly beautiful. One scene set in a field of
irises is so delectably proffered you can practically smell the perfume.
Another, where Fanny lies on her bed, contemplating her love while the
breeze blows a curtain over her body, is like the memory of an experience
you know you've had yourself, but can't quite place.
Campion's script is not just another
shot in the Austen canon for another reason. The tragic subtext of every
Austen story is the fundamental unfairness of the system to women, as
in "how horrible that middle-class women had no options other than
marrying well." As Bright Star dramatizes, though, the options
for early 19th century males without property or prospects weren't so
rosy either. Indeed, it is arguably Keats who is the more trapped here.
The attractive Fanny at least has the possibility of moving on to a
suitable (rich) partner; one gets the sense that Keats, who can do nothing
other than write unprofitable verse, is just too ill-equipped to survive
in this world.
Whishaw, who was a sphinx in Perfume
and bowl of fruit in Brideshead Revisited, actually gets to behave
and speak like a plausible human being here. The real story, however,
is Abbie Cornish. She inhabits her role with such fierce intelligence,
yet touching vulnerability, that I had to recheck if this was the same
actress who played the hard drinkin', hard cussin' Texas girl in Stop-Loss.
Whether she's in a periwinkle bonnet or cowboy boots, she is genuinely
unmissable .
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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