Bright Star - Worth Seeing (By James A. King)

“A Thing of Beauty is a joy for ever:  Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness.” 

Bright Star is first and foremost beautiful. Cinematic beauty shines through every frame: beauty in the perfect light on the heath, in the first flirtations between Fanny and Keats, and even in the signature tartan onesie of Keats’s gregarious, awesome-in-every-scene, friend Brown.  Following Keats’s lead, director Jane Campion has created a space for viewers to lose themselves in the sensuousness of words and images.  Though the doomed love story between the dying poet and his levelheaded love is presented realistically, Bright Star subtly filters that reality through the poet’s own heightened sense of beauty in the everyday. Notice how bright the colors, perfect the speech, and crisp the costumes remain up until the later, Keats-less scenes in the movie, where the color dims and objects become viewed through windows and mirrors rather than through touch and sense.   

 A lesser movie about a Romantic poet’s love affair would not have been able to tow the line between the real and aesthetic—either becoming too poetic and artsy to stomach or too dusty and “period drama” to say anything about a poet obsessed with beauty. If the acting had not been so good or so focused on maintaining the human drama, the movie might have been lost in the lushness and poetic abstractions; but as it is, genuine emotion about real world concerns (income, sickness, etc.) complements the film’s exuberant visuals to create a movie both grounded and ethereal.  It could be said, that Bright Star’s content follows its characters by fusing Fanny’s level-headedness (she liked house parties and made money) with Keats’s dreaminess (liked lying in tree-tops and owed money).  For instance, there are un-idealized scenes of Keats’s dingy penury in London and then there are scenes like when Fanny walks through a field of blue flowers clutching a love letter from Keats, and the letter’s words melodically play in voice over and the flowers become just a bit glowy in their blueness and the camera a bit tipsy in following Fanny into the flowers. Scenes like this speak more to how Keats might have imagined her reading the letter, implying that treasured memories and imagined images of things hoped for are always infinitely re-playable and in more glossy high def than the actual occurrence.  This scene in particular embodies Keats’s idea of a “thing of beauty,” a beauty existing in the imagination and therefore invulnerable to decay or death—a sustaining artistic and personal belief for a man that knew his own life would pass before the age of 26.  

So if this movie is so deep and pretty, why am I giving it a Worth Seeing and not a Freaking Revolutionary?  I’m going to evade this question with a Wikipedia definition of Keats’s “negative capability:” “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” So the only way that I can answer this question without becoming irritable is to say that I’m uncertain where this movie’s value lies—and think that is the point.  It doesn’t do anything revolutionary in moviemaking, and I doubt whether it will change a single life, but rather Bright Star simply gives viewers an opportunity to experience and meditate on beauty—isn’t that enough?  If you think so, be sure to stay for the credits. 

Trailer