Bright Star

Jane Campion’s film is beautifully and sensually shot, but it largely glosses over the darker side of John Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne

It takes some substantial effort to romanticise the story of John Keats. The perception we have of him is already hyperbolic in the extreme: of all the Romantic poets his name is linked most closely with fragile idealism, the naïve equation of truth with beauty.

It is hard to imagine a poet in whose corpus raw emotion plays a more vital role, or to conceive of one whose biography and personal correspondence bring more to bear on the reading of his verse. With this in mind, the fact that Jane Campion’s film Bright Star only heightens these aspects of his story rather than attempting a more subtle examination could be considered a failing.

Given that Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne – the Bright Star of the film’s title – are some of the most famous love letters in English, it is perhaps surprising that there have not been more cinematic accounts of their relationship. Exploiting this potent subject matter, Campion’s film is visually arresting and Abby Cornish – the Australian actress who plays Brawne – delivers an outstanding performance; simultaneously sexual and cerebral, assured and yet vulnerable.

None of Brawne’s letters to Keats survives, meaning she exists now in the gaps between his own epistles. This gives a filmmaker a wonderful opportunity to draw the character, and she is duly the most interesting thing about the film. Ben Whishaw’s Keats, on the other hand, is a wet blanket, which is not an unfair portrayal but does mean that the viewer’s interest in the two leads is likely to be heavily lop-sided in favour of Cornish’s Brawne.

Having said this, her apparently unwavering dedication to Keats and the extent to which she is racked with grief at his death paint her as being weaker than his letters would suggest. There, it is always Brawne who seems to hold the strings that pull at Keats’s heart; in Campion’s film, it is the other way round, and Whishaw’s foppish feebleness sometimes make this hard to believe.

Furthermore, as the epitaph on his gravestone attests, when Keats died in 1821 he famously believed “in the bitterness of his heart” that “his name was writ in water”. He also complained in one letter to Brawne in May 1820 that he could not “endure much longer the agonies and uncertainties which you are so peculiarly made to create”. Both suggest a deep regret that both his poetry and his relationship with Brawne fell short of perfection.

But the focus of Bright Star is almost entirely on the mutual devotion of the drama's two central players. Missing are the doubt, distrust and ultimate lack of fulfilment.

Given that Andrew Motion (the former poet laureate and Keats biographer) is credited as a consultant on the film, it is likely that Campion’s artistic decisions are based on a specific and coherent interpretation of his life. Viewers that are happy to accept this will probably find themselves more able to delight in the rich visual fabric, thick with pathetic fallacy.

Others will find the film’s indulgence in beauty for the sake of beauty unconvincing. It may depend whether you are convinced by what Keats believed himself.