bright star

{all images from Bright Star or Jane Campion's Production Scrapbook

My friend Michele came over last night and we watched the movie Bright Star. I had never seen it before. Have you seen it? It's very well-acted, and visually stunning. 

It has lots of whispering and looking and pretty words.

While I was watching it, I was thinking about that famous bit of criticism about Keat's Edymion by John Croker, who wrote:

There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds . . .

That's how Jane Campion's direction feels in this, too, but purposefully.  It feels like a Keats poem.  I bet that was the idea. There is not a lot of exposition. You just jump in and have to figure out what is going on.  And some of the shorter scenes feel like photographs in an album, flying by.  I liked that bit.

I knew going into it that it would be sad, of course, because all three of those Keats brothers had TB, and because all three of those later Romantic poets (Keats, Shelley, and Byron) had such horribly tragic lives.  That has fed the appeal for their poetry, I think.  So the sad parts didn't blindside me.

I wasn't sure what else to expect.  The trouble with biographical stories about great writers is always that they don't do much of anything. They sit around and they write. Sometimes they frown and throw paper in the trashcan.

But there was a romance here worth writing about, I guess.  Although, as I watched, I didn't find myself connecting to the love between Keats and Fanny.  The character of Fanny didn't move me, because I didn't respect her. (Although Abbie Cornish's acting is great, and of course her gowns are wonderful to look at.) So their romance didn't do anything for me. (Most critics think his Odes, which he wrote in 1819 when he knew Fanny, were his best and most important poems.  She was an important muse, even if their romance didn't get to me.) 

I don't think I'll recommend it to people in general, or even to you all (except for specific literary-type friends who wouldn't want to miss anything about Keats).  I'm just not all excited about it like some other period pieces I've seen lately, like, say, Little Dorrit or Cranford, which I recommend to anyone I talk to. :)

But what has been in my head today as I think about the movie is the romance of the character of Keats himself, and his poetry. That was worth watching the movie for, for me.

When Keats (played by Ben Wishaw) stands very still, so quiet and sick and poetic and disheveled (and his face is wonderfully changeable, so that no one scene of melancholy looks quite like the other), you can imagine anything romantic you've got inside your own head at all, and place your ideas onto his character, and make him into someone very interesting, indeed.