Steadfast As Thou

In Bright Star, John Keats is the intruder into the story of Fanny Brawne. Screenwriter and director Jane Campion (In the Cut, The Piano) has made her Fanny a true bright star for John to orbit. Campion has brought to lovely life not only the facts of their relationship but the spirit of the poetry that it inspired, and which made the poet the towering figure he is in our minds today. (The poem the film is named for is his ode to Fanny.) The beauty of the Romantic poets’ values radiates off the screen: the impossibility of separating ourselves from nature, the importance of appreciating the experience of living, the pleasure we take in beauty being its own kind of beauty.

The beauty is there in the knowing dreaminess of the Keats of Ben Whishaw (The International, Brideshead Revisited), who is moody and melancholy as he mopes around the rambling Hampstead houses and fields and woods, thinking of little but words and love and nesting in trees of an afternoon. It’s there in the steely certainty of the Fanny of Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss, Elizabeth: The Golden Age), as modern a girl as they come even today: 18 years old, consumed with fashion and creative about it, positive that a poor poet is the man for her.

Marriage is the only option for a respectable, well-brought-up girl like Fanny, for it is 1818, and that’s just how things are. But these are not people who are living in a corseted theme-park version of the past: They don’t wear costumes but clothes — John, especially, is so wonderfully unkempt half the time that he’s entirely the 1818 equivalent of a dude lounging around in old jeans and a torn T-shirt.

As Fanny takes to moping over the impossibility of her love for John, she isn’t much unlike teenagers today. Indeed, there’s palpable anguish onscreen here, all around. Earlier, it’s in John’s bewilderment at finding himself in love with one such as Fanny, all brash daring and foolish frippery: He doesn’t know what to make of women at all, he acknowledges. It’s in Fanny’s wallowing in the wonderful misery of being in love. It’s in John’s best friend and fellow poet Charles Brown, a bulldog presence who resents Fanny’s intrusion into the relationship of two men. As Brown, Paul Schneider (Lars and the Real Girl, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) is almost terrifyingly aggressive, though often amusingly so, too. It’s there later, when Fanny learns that she and John will never be together again, in a grief so powerful it stunned me into sharing it.

Whishaw and Cornish smolder together in a way that we don’t often see onscreen because their characters can never quite give in to their desire for each other.

It’s not only the best possible ode to Keats’ work, this lovely gentle poetic film, it’s the best possible ode to Fanny, as well. If she made him feel the way Bright Star feels, that must have been a powerful love indeed.