tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Starring: Ben Whishaw, Abbie Cornish, Paul Schneider, Thomas Sangster, Samuel Barnett
Director: Jane Campion
Release Date: October 15, 2009
Running Time: 119 min
MPAA Rating: PG
Distributor: Jan Chapman Pictures, BBC Films, Hopscotch Productions

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Character, says Heraclitus, is fate. In the case of English poet John Keats, character might also be manifested in the physical.

The tragedy (the affliction of tuberculosis) that runs in his family, which has also manifested unto him, made Keats frail and emaciated, and just like everything in his short life, even love ends in tragedy.

Acclaimed filmmaker Jane Campion's latest offering, Bright Star, tells the love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Playing the ill-fated lovers are Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in career-defining performances.

Following the death of his grandmother, John Keats (Ben Whishaw) soon found his brother, Tom Keats (Olly Alexander), entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering, as his mother had, from tuberculosis. Finishing his epic poem Endymion, Keats left to walk in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider). However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. When he did, he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. On 1 December 1818, Tom Keats died of his disease, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in Hampstead, next to Hampstead Heath. There he lived next door to Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), who had been staying there with her mother.
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Starring: Ben Whishaw, Abbie Cornish, Paul Schneider, Thomas Sangster, Samuel Barnett
Director: Jane Campion
Release Date: October 15, 2009
Running Time: 119 min
MPAA Rating: PG
Distributor: Jan Chapman Pictures, BBC Films, Hopscotch Productions

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Read John Keats' poetry, a nineteenth century English poet in his mid-twenties, and you'll have a better understanding of the approach director Jane Campion has taken in recreating the last years of his short lived life (he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five). Campion ("The Piano"), like Keats' vast body of work, is meticulously dedicated to precision and beauty that happens to spring out of nowhere. A majority of "Bright Star's" scenes take on a life of their own, forming its beauty, structuring its own meaningfulness and creating images that, if appreciated, should remain in memory for quite sometime.

Circumstances arise out of nature to create stunning glimpses of visual poetry. A woman collapsing sweetly, full of romantic swelling, into a luscious green garden scattered about with lavender is the quintessential image of ravishing romance. But the endless flakes of snow that come crashing down elegantly on a bare branch of a tree, is a perfect example of Campion's poetic direction. Her filmmaking is unforced, unlike her narrative, naturally depicting the tranquil and subtle scenic grandeur of England and morphing it to resemble dream-like imagery.

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