by Louisa Thomas

When I read John Keats’s poetry in high school and college, I had a particularly vivid picture of the poet: pale and elfin—hardly five feet tall—with longish, curling brown hair, large eyes, and a finely formed mouth. I could see him pausing to contemplate sharp edges of summer’s shadows or a winter’s field shirred by frost. My image of Keats, in fact, looks a lot like Ben Whishaw does in Bright Star. But there the similarity more or less ends—because Keats, at least as I understood him, was always thinking thrillingly about death. The Keats in Bright Star sometimes seems to be wondering what’s for lunch.

I don’t blame Whishaw, who plays Keats as the script requires. Bright Star is about Keats’s lover, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), not about the poet—Keats is just the dreamy, fragile foil. Jane Campion, director of The Piano and other films known for their acute and sensitive portraits of female psychology, has created a heroine with unusual depth and complexity. Whishaw’s Keats, by contrast, seems like he’s stuck in a sumptuous but vacuous costume drama. 

Brawne is smart, witty, stylish, and terrifically moody, a young woman in love with a man she can’t have. Like Keats, Brawne is deeply sensitive to beauty. She’s indifferent to poetry, however—as indifferent as most, well, Americans, haughtily dismissing poetry as “scribblings” when she first meets Keats in 1818. In a softer mood, she confesses that she finds poetry difficult. Her appreciation for poetry grows throughout the movie, but it’s clear that she’s more interested in her teacher than his lessons. An artist with a needle and thread, she likes to make things you can see and touch. Some of the movie’s best shots are of women working with their hands—baking, arranging, and, most of all, stitching. There’s a rare and welcome attention to craft in this movie. There’s less attention to the craft of poetry, which seems thin stuff by comparison with the beautiful shots of Brawne’s handmade clothes or the butterfly apiary that she turns her bedroom into. The lovers trade lines and recite poetry—sometimes effectively and beautifully—but they don’t always seem to understand what they’re saying. Their chemistry is physical, not literary.  

Campion has pitched her movie as a kind of education in poetry, as well as love. This sounds good in interviews—a public service embedded in a classic romance—but it doesn’t really play out on the screen, and maybe it’s for the best. Campion is too smart for such mawkish didacticism. In the movie, when Keats’s protective (and somewhat jealous) friend Charles Brown (a burly, bearish Paul Schneider) challenges Brawne to prove her interest in poetry, she lies and says she’s read all of Milton. Her interest in Keats’s poetry reflects her interest in Keats—understandably. She’s an 18-year-old in love, not a student in an English seminar.

Movies about writers are often difficult to adapt, because it’s hard to put the act of writing onto the big screen. In Bright Star, Keats does a lot of lying on the couch, looking exhausted by his genius. At the end of the movie, after contracting tuberculosis, he goes from weak to feeble. Keats was not your typical consumptive, penniless dreamer, however. He was a stronger person than Campion allows him to be.  Love for him was something complex and troubling—and loving him must have been more complex and troubling than the film allows.
 
For Keats, love was entwined with death, rapture with sorrow. His poetry—especially his later works, which he wrote in the few feverish years when he knew and loved Brawne—defined the edge of things, the line between light and shadow, ecstasy and despair. Brawne was his “bright star,” the Venus to whom he sent his prayers and his poems, and in whose unchanging light he would “so live ever—or else swoon in death.” The movie skips the fact that she was also, perhaps, the inspiration for “Lamia”—a poem about a serpent that turns itself into a woman and, though genuinely in love, manipulates and destroys her lover. “A man in love I do think cuts the sorriest figure in the world,” he wrote his brother in September 1819. “Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out laughing in his face—his pathetic visage becomes irresistible.” Keats did not want to fall in love with Brawne, and he resisted it, in the way that a living thing resists its death but must succumb in the end. When Keats, whose mother and brother had died of tuberculosis and who had training as a medical student, saw the spot of blood from his cough in 1820, he knew he would soon die. He had long expected that moment to come. Perhaps more than anyone before or since, he already had the sense of being a mortal, fragile thing, and he embraced it.

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks,” Keats’s soft voice says overhead as Brawne reads his letter, “your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.” The hour of my death? This is Keats—jarring, shocking, beautiful Keats. With butterflies clinging to her blouse, Brawne, however, doesn’t seem to notice anything strange about that line—or about “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”—the beautiful woman without mercy—which Keats and Brawne recite to each other lying on a bed, and which contains the terrifying stanza:

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried—"La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!"