Abbie Cornish

Ben Whishaw

Paul Schneider

Kerry Fox

Edie Martin

Thomas Brodie-Sangster

Claudie Blakley

Gerard Monaco

Antonia Campbell-Hughes

Samuel Roukin

Amanda Hale

Lucinda Raikes

Samuel Barnett

Jonathan Aris

Olly Alexander

Roger Ashton-Griffiths

Eileen Davies

Sebastian Armesto

Adrian Schiller

Theresa Watson

Vincent Franklin

Jane Campion

David Hindle

John Dennison

Steve Dunn

Janet Patterson

David M. Thompson

Alexandre de Franceschi

Charlotte Dirickx

Nina Gold

Cameron McCracken

Caroline Hewitt

François Ivernel

Greig Fraser

Christian Huband

Jan Chapman

Glenn Marks

Christine Langan

Emma Mager

Mark Bradshaw

Michael Elliott

Anita Anderson

Angelo Bonanni

Konnie Daniel

Laura Schiavo

Leon Anderson

Jane Logan

Dan Johnston

Fulvia Bartoli

Helen Brown

Tony Vaccher

Robert Sterne

Duncan McAllister

Stefano Maria Ortolani

Peter Gleaves

Chris Navarro

Paul Huntingford

Sean O'Reilly

Andrew Motion

Guglielmo Lepri

Drama

Romance

Bright Star

Pathe

Screen Australia

UK Film Council

Hopscotch Productions

Bright Star Films

Jan Chapman Productions

New South Wales Film & Television Office

Australia

United Kingdom

Français

English

london, england

poet

duringcreditsstinger

woman director

19th century

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 would be a slow and dull romantic drama for you.

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).

Bright Star Trailer (HD)

Bright Star( 2009)

First love burns brightest.

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A review by Andres Gomez

Written by Andres Gomez on Wed Nov 05 2014

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