Bright Star, Dim Star, Bright Star, Dim Star

Since I first learned about Jane Campion's film Bright Star,the story of John Keats's doomed relationship with his sometime muse, Fanny Brawne, I have been somewhere between ambivalent and schizophrenic about it.

One the one hand I have loved Keats poetry since I first encountered Ode on a Grecian Urn as a high school student and then chose him as an author to focus on in college, so why wouldn't I love the opportunity to see a biopic of him? Well....Becoming Jane for starters. I hate it when the genius of a favorite artist is reduced to being simply the result of thwarted love. Yes, Keats adored Fanny. Yes, she inspired some of his poetry, but there was so much more to Keats than this single infatuation followed by his untimely death from tuberculosis.

Nevertheless, I did get caught up in the excitement surrounding Bright Star in the blogosphere and read so many good reviews of it that I was first in the queue at Netflix when the DVD was released.

Did I like it? Yes and no. I thought it was brilliantly acted, lusciously filmed, gloriously costumed, and poorly scripted. I was confused. While I've read all of Keats poems, some repeatedly, and all of his letters, though quite awhile ago, I've never read a biography. I couldn't quite remember why he came to be living with Charles Brown, who the people were who rented the house to Charles Brown and Fanny's family and came to tea and offered advice, and why Charles Brown was so condescending to Fanny, was there a backstory there I didn't know about? The movie never explained any of this, nor did it explain who the young men were who raised the funds to send Keats to Rome and his death.

Since Bright Star was really only about the relationship between Keats and Fanny, I think I would have liked it better had we not had all these other characters floating about who were apparently extraneous to the story but kept getting in the way and confusing and annoying me.

To be honest, I did get caught up in the love story. But again, nit-picking, I felt a certain frustration in Keats being forever barred from marrying Fanny because he had no money. If he loved her that much, why didn't he get a job so that they could marry? Oh, yes, he was a poet and needed his musing time. I'm being facetious, but why couldn't the script have him rant even a little about having to choose poetry over Fanny because that is what he ultimately did. Instead, it seemed like Mrs. Brawne and the busy-body landlady were pulling a Lady Russell and forbidding Fanny to "marry for love." You can't live on love, even passionate love, and it bugs me that Bright Star reduces Keats's life to that simple plot line.

The absolutely best part of the movie was Ben Whishaw as Keats reciting his poetry. I would have been perfectly happy to have 2 hours of that with the pretty images of Keats/Fanny walking over the bridge, gathering flowers, pressing hands to the walls that separated them, gazing at the sky, etc.



I thought Abbie Cornish did a wonderful job as Fanny--I am predisposed not to like Fanny but she overcame my long-term prejudice against the woman who broke Keats's heart. She was a sweet sister, a dutiful daughter, a pragmatic yet romantic young woman (i.e., a nice mixture of sense and sensibility), with a feisty streak. In a way, I wish Bright Star had been more about her and how one of the world's greatest poets touched her life and heart and then was gone. I guess that's what it the movie ultimately was, but the tag line to the movie about how she walked alone for a long time after Keats died was just too sappy for me. I would have rather seen how Keats affected her--how she handled her loss. The movie should have had Keats dying in the middle and then it could have showed how Fanny dealt with it and grew up and moved on, but was still steadfast and true.

You see...I am ambivalent about this movie, to the point of rewriting it!

Bright Star vs. This Living Hand

The poem that has always characterized the John Keats/Fanny Brawne romance in my mind is not Bright Star, the title of the movie to be released in October 2009 on Keats/Brawne, but this one...

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.

My understanding of the Keats/Brawne relationship is that he was infatuated and she disdainful. The movie trailer suggests that she did love him, but turned away from marriage with him for practical reasons. I never thought that was the case--I always understood that his love for her was unrequited, and This Living Hand, has an immaturity to it that speaks more of infatuation and disillusionment and anger at her indifference than anything else. There is some speculation that the person addressed in the poem is collectively the critics who were harsh towards Keats. If that is the case, then the immaturity and anger I felt the poem expressed becomes pettishness that is distasteful. I'm staying with the camp that says it was directed to Fanny.

I love Keats--his odes and sonnets are among my favorite literature of all time, but I hate to see filmmakers insist on reducing all forms of genius to Hallmark love stories. I can't buy that Keats' prowess as a poet stemmed in any way from his relationship with Fanny Brawne any more than I can buy that Jane Austen's prowess as a novelist stemmed in any way from her relationship with Tom LeFroy.

Somehow our culture has reached the conclusion that love is the only emotion that matters, and so all artists's work must be related to love. When love stories don't exist, they are created for the poor souls who apparently lived without a life-defining love story. Frankly, I think a movie about Keats's relationship with other poets who did truly shape his career would be not only more accurate but more interesting. Does every story have to be a love story?

I have yet to see Becoming Jane, though my curiousity is starting to win out over common sense. I'm not sure about Bright Star. Certainly based on the trailer, I won't like it. Fanny Brawne was not Keats's bright star or guiding light--she was a girl he mooned over and who didn't much care for him. Nor did she inspire his greatest works--it took a nightingale, an urn, and autumn to do that. Bright Star, even if it is about her, is good, but not great. This Living Hand is not even that good.

For the record, here is Bright Star:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.