A positive review (most positive about the photography) from David Denby in THE NEW YORKER...

In Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” a half-educated but boldly self-possessed and talented beauty named Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) captures first the admiration and then the love of a tubercular young man (Ben Whishaw), who spends his days sitting with a friend in a darkened room in his house in London or wandering Hampstead Heath in a seeming trance. He’s a most unpromising fellow: sometimes spirited and funny, but often sunk in quiet and apparently unproductive melancholy. It is 1818, and the young man, John Keats, will die in a few years, at the age of twenty-five, and soon afterward become known, despite much criticism of his work, as one of the greatest English poets since Shakespeare and Milton. Campion doesn’t play up the irony that few of her characters have any notion of who the young man is. The movie is not the kind of portentous bio-pic in which history, like some sort of hooded eagle, perches on the shoulders of every scene, waiting to soar. Campion, who wrote the script as well as directed, keeps the action day-by-day, small-scale, and casually lyrical. The tale of the love affair (chaste, in this version) is told from Fanny’s point of view. At first, she hardly understands poetry. An expert dressmaker and a prodigious flirt, she tries to fake her way through a kind of exam administered by Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s protector and amanuensis. Brown is a self-hating buffoon who nevertheless has a perfect ear for Keats’s work; he sees Fanny as an ignorant girl who will trap the poet in the soul-destroying vulgarity of sexual pleasure. At the same time, Fanny’s mother regards Keats as charming but remarkably impecunious—an unsuitable match for her daughter. In some ways, “Bright Star” is a conventional tale of frustrated young love.

The stern elders relent, and Keats and Fanny spend much time together—kissing and canoodling like any other young pair but also reciting, back and forth, some of Keats’s poetry, almost as if it were the stuff of everyday conversation. Fanny becomes both muse and sounding board, and Abbie Cornish, eyes widening, breasts partly bared, is a luscious ideal. Many of Whishaw and Cornish’s scenes together have a high-spirited delicacy that borders on the precious but then pulls back. For instance, Whishaw speaks some of the poems as if he were not quite sure that he had the right to impose them on other people’s attention. In this interpretation, Keats is still a brilliant boy, his genius constrained by shyness and chagrin. Campion makes only one serious mistake: when Whishaw recites the lines “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,” he actually rests his head on Cornish’s chest. The literalness borders on the laughable, and you wonder, disconcertingly, how these two relieve what look like unbearable states of arousal. In general, though, Campion handles as well as any director has the impossible task of fitting poetry into everyday life. Keats speaks plainly and vigorously much of the time, but he also slips into metaphor and eloquence as easily as the rest of us slip into banality. In “Bright Star,” he is, convincingly, a great dying poet. What makes the movie extraordinary, however, is not so much the portrait of a poet as the accuracy and the detail of the period re-creation. Indoors, a whitish light from the windows half-illuminates rooms. There’s a full complement of geese and mud and some women in bonnets, but Campion avoids finery and ceremony. She doesn’t show off the period; she triumphantly makes it a time in which people live as best they can. A few outdoor scenes are set in dry fields, but there are summer moments, too, of spectacular lavender flowers and innumerable butterflies. I don’t think it’s mere sentiment to demonstrate that the author of the odes and sonnets, though miserable, obscure, and disappointed, lived, at times, in scenes of the most intense beauty.

A positive review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...

Jane Campion’s high-strung romance Bright Star has a rhythm all its own—glancing yet abrasive. Every quick exchange conveys violence: not physical, but with physical power, as if blood could truly be poisoned by lovesickness and a heart could literally break. In pungent strokes, the film depicts the agonizingly unconsummated affair of the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his young Hampstead neighbor, the flirtatious, fashionable Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). She begs Keats to tutor her in poetry and longs to become his wife, however dire his prospects; he writhes from the sting of poverty and critical disdain. There is a third unruly force: Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), whose antipathy toward Fanny borders on invasive. He mocks and harangues her, consciously adopting the manners of the ape she has branded him—determined to keep his fragile Keats in a pure state, primed for the visit of the Muse. Given the stress on the poor Romantic genius, it’s surprising his first consumptive cough takes as long to arrive as it does.

Bright Star is the nearest the New Zealand–born auteur Campion has come to what Keats called “negative capability,” which I’ll define here as entering fully into an imaginative world and leaving one’s arty mannerisms and punishingly masochistic feminist agenda behind. Well, there is a modest feminist agenda. Working with poet and Keats biographer Sir Andrew Motion, Campion aims to salvage Brawne’s good name. In the nineteenth century, she gained a reputation as an Alma Mahler–like slut (only less beautiful and talented) who overtaxed her brilliant lover and had the tastelessness to publish his demonstrative love letters when his star was posthumously ascendant. The movie leaves no doubt that the world is better for those sublime letters, and that the bullyboy Brown—who knocks up the Irish maid (Antonia Campbell-Hughes)—is male predatory instinct incarnate. What keeps all this from seeming overmelodramatic is Schneider’s huge performance, which is too hilarious. All costume dramas need actors this rude.

Even if you set aside Schneider, Bright Star is remarkably evocative. It is our postmodern, ironic way to picture Romantic poets as lyrical fops lolling under gray English skies, their musings interrupted by bronchial spasms aimed at tastefully blood-spotted handkerchiefs. But Campion brings out the tension between Keats’s supple language, with its yearning for the eternal (“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art … ”), and his fevered awareness of his own mortality. One scene—in which a miserable Fanny and her little sister, “Toots” (Edie Martin), fill her room with butterflies—has a visionary mixture of beauty and evanescence. Production and costume designer Janet Patterson revels in the eye-popping showiness of 1820s fashions—Brawne’s self-sewn flouncy ruffles, the elongated top hats—without tipping into camp. Their movie has too much rough texture for camp.

Cornish and Whishaw are wonderfully matched. She’s plusher than in the past, and her character struggles for poise in a way that’s most un–Keira Knightley. She’s a touching mess when she lies on her bed, all coquettishness burned away, and moans, “Is this love? I’ll never tease about it again.” Whishaw gropes his way through verses I know so well as if he’s still working on them. There isn’t a less-than-perfect performance, but in the end, my heart belongs to Toots. Young Edie Martin, with her chaotic swarm of red ringlets and deadpan dutifulness (she has few lines, but they’re goodies), is the movie’s sign of eternal spring—the butterfly atop the just-opened blossom.

A rave review from Ray Bennett in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...

CANNES -- A treat for romantics and those who take their poetry seriously, New Zealand director Jane Campion's gorgeously filmed Festival de Cannes Competition entry "Bright Star" may not be a joy forever but it will do until the next joy comes along.

With much grace and at considerable leisure, 1993 Palme d'Or winner Campion ("The Piano") tells the story of the brief love affair between the gifted but early dead poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Ben Whishaw plays Keats with impeccable tragedy and Abbie Cornish portrays winningly the beautiful seamstress Fanny, whose passion is constrained only by the rigorous mores of the times.

Cynics need not apply and it's doubtful that "Bright Star" will be the shining light at many suburban cineplexes, but festivals will eat it up, art house audiences will swoon and it will have a lucrative life on DVD and Blu-ray, not to mention the BBC and PBS.

The England depicted in the film is the one people are thinking of when they say they wish they were born during the time of the romantic poets. Only one scene in the picture shows the ugly underbelly of poverty in 1880s London, and for the rest it's all picturesque houses and gorgeous gardens in Hampstead Village.

There, Fanny lives with her widowed mother, Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox), and her well-behaved younger siblings Samuel (Thomas Brodie Sangster) and Margaret, known as Toots, (Edie Martin).

Their place in society takes them to social events and balls where Fanny's dance-card is always filled, although the glamorous Keats prefers not to dance. She has made a name, and money, for herself as a skilled maker of fashionable garments, although the best friend of the coveted Keats, a burly writer named Brown (Paul Schneider), dismisses her as "the very well-stitched Miss Brawne."

Fastidious and proud, Fanny feuds with Brown, who is over-protective of his genius friend, but she sends Toots to buy a copy of the poet's latest collection, as the child says, "to see if he's an idiot or not."

Persuaded that Keats is far from an idiot, she commences a romance that takes place within all the formal manners of the day, so that intimacy relies on kissed love letters and briefly touched hands. When Keats' brother Tom dies of consumption, things do not auger well, and while the love affair between the poet and the seamstress grows, his fate already has been written.

The English Whishaw, who was a sensation as Hamlet in Trevor Nunn's Old Vic stage production in 2004, played the similarly doomed Sebastian Flyte in "Brideshead Revisited" last year but makes his Keats singularly memorable. Cornish has the acting skill to match her striking beauty and she makes the small loving gestures that the British might call soppy both real and touching. Among the pleasures of the film is listening to them both declaim Keats' poetry.

The entire cast is good, with Schneider, who was among the exceptional ensemble in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," and Fox especially strong. Cinematographer Greig Fraser beautifully captures Janet Patterson's sumptuous production and costume designs, as well as the lovely gardens and countryside. Mark Bradshaw's elegant score is pleasingly delicate.

A very positive review from Todd McCarthy in VARIETY...

The Jane Campion embraced by 1990s arthouse audiences but who’s been missing of late makes an impressive return with “Bright Star.” Breaking through any period-piece mustiness with piercing insight into the emotions and behavior of her characters, the writer-director examines the final years in the short life of 19th-century romantic poet John Keats through the eyes of his beloved, Fanny Brawne, played by Abbie Cornish in an outstanding performance. Beautifully made film possesses solid appeal for specialized auds in most markets, including the U.S., where it will be released by Bob Berney and Bill Pohlad’s yet-to-be named new distribution company, although its poetic orientation and dramatic restraint will likely stand in the way of wider acceptance.

Keats died in 1821 at age 25, and his final years were marked by an incredible burst of creativity as well as by his one great romance, which inspired some extraordinary love letters. By concentrating on the latter, as experienced by Fanny, Campion gives rather short shrift to the former, leaving the viewer with a vivid picture of the social constraints on grand passion and romantic fulfillment in England at the time. While avoiding the typical biopic template, the film nonetheless honors the facts of the central relationship, which means some typical, central audience expectations concerning emotional payoff aren’t met.

Most of the action is confined to two neighboring houses in Hampstead Village, North London, beginning in 1818. Living in one is the Brawne family, a fatherless brood consisting of matriarch Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox), 18-year-old daughter Fanny (Cornish), teenager Samuel (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and little sprite Toots (Edie Martin), while the bearded, boorish Mr. Brown (Paul Schneider) and Keats (Ben Whishaw) occupy the other.

While unobtrusively laying in the character dynamics -- Brown, highly protective of his Keats, is pointedly rude to Fanny and does all he can to keep her away from his friend, whom he tirelessly helps with his work -- Campion devotes special attention to the physical and aural aspects of this little middle-class corner of British society, thereby highlighting the sensual qualities of life that particularly captivated Keats himself. The opening shots convey the act of sewing -- Fanny’s frequent activity -- with unsurpassed intimacy, while a performance by a small male chorus at a domestic party carries oddly moving force, and other scenes pointedly focus upon pastimes that quiver with quasi-sexual sublimation, including dancing, sport, butterfly-collecting and hunting for the most fragrant flowers.

Then there is the poetry, which brings home the realization of how few films have ever dealt with poets and their work. Effectively establishing herself as an onscreen proxy for most viewers, Fanny early on confesses to Keats that “poems are a strain to work out,” but then volunteers to take lessons in poetry appreciation, which allows Keats to recommend an emotional, impressionistic reaction rather than an intellectual one. Writing her screenplay in a way that plainly speaks of another era and yet comes across as natural and unaffected, Campion works in snippets of Keats’ work at relevant moments, even under the end credits.

Although he makes a point of articulating his perplexed attitude about women, the slim, dreamily attractive Keats is clearly captivated by Fanny, who stands out by virtue of the direct gaze with which she meets all people and predicaments. All the same, she can scarcely throw off the constraints of family expectations and social norms, just as Keats feels unable and even unqualified to pursue a proper courtship with Fanny due to his poverty and lack of prospects.

For these and other reasons, which initially include the fatal (and foreshadowing) illness of Keats’ brother Tom and persistently involve Brown’s interference and the poet’s periodic absences, the great romance blossoms very slowly. Even at its height, it is physically expressed only by gentle kissing and caressing; actual consummation is not in the cards, and Campion stringently avoids even so much as a grand clinch or music-swelled embrace, permitting the emotions to be expressed largely through letters and verse.

Keats, who feels himself “dissolving” in his love for Fanny, also begins to dissipate physically from tuberculosis. Advised to move to a warmer climate, he decamps for Italy, where he succumbs. Rightly judging that, like the act of writing, endless coughing up of blood does not make for very edifying viewing, Campion conveys the climactic information as Fanny learns it, to palpably convulsive effect.

With brown hair pulled tightly back and a tad more filled out than before, Cornish is made to look plainer than she actually is, which better emphasizes the importance of Fanny’s character for Keats. The majority of her performance’s success rests in her eyes, which are remarked upon by Brown for their amber hue and which, one senses, see and process so much. All of Campion’s films center upon strong, complicated women, and Cornish’s Fanny takes her place among the most memorable of them.

What’s missing is an equally compelling sense of Keats’ singular attributes. Everything one reads about the poet emphasizes his extreme sensitivity to nature and his almost swooning reaction to sensory stimuli. While these qualities are embedded in the filmmaking here, most particularly in the work of production and costume designer Janet Patterson and cinematographer Greig Fraser (who previously shot the shorts “The Water Diary” and “The Lady Bug” for Campion), they are not so evident in the writing of Keats’ character or in the performance of Whishaw, which is appealing but not nearly as trenchant as that of his co-star.

Schneider’s oozing presence as Brown creates a constant sense of unease for Fanny, while Martin is entirely winning presence as Fanny’s redheaded little sister. Mark Bradshaw’s score reps a major plus.

A *** out of **** review from SLANT...

by Ed Gonzalez
Posted: September 14, 2009

Jane Campion's painstakingly crafted and lachrymose biopic Bright Star, about the mystifying romance between the great John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), begins with an image of a hand stitching. As in The Piano, another metaphoric reverie of love and creation, a woman is defined by what she does—or doesn't do—with her fingers, but Bright Star is a less astringent feminist statement, for Fanny accepts rather than rejects her domesticated role in 19th-century society, though her pride and cunning defiance of the insidiousness attributed to her motivations by Keats's friend and fellow poet Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider) is portrayed by Campion as a revolution, albeit a quaint one.

Part of Bright Star's intelligence is its lack of hysteria, the almost matter-of-fact way that Campion places her characters on the same level playing field, with Fanny condescending to Charles in much the same manner that he does to her. The film is, at its core, the tale of a ménage à trios, with Fanny ingratiating herself into John's life to the utter mortification of Charles, who reveres the time he shares with his friend as if they were lovers—or understands their time to be short. Walking into John and Charles's writing chamber for the first time, Fanny is like a small creature entering a wolf's cave, though ultimately she seems less afraid of what the pair's reaction to her intrusion will be than she is curious of the process by which men create.

Through stylish close-ups and breathtaking use of ellipses, Campion contrasts John and Fanny's work habits, suggesting through a lush filmic vernacular how these two figures were not only fiercely devoted to their work but also kindred spirits. In a key scene, John, who initially comes across as being completely ambivalent toward Fanny, draws a profound comparison between poetry, not just his own, and jumping into water. Something of a cipher, his tortured sense of self is illuminated by this scene and a later one in which he, invited by Fanny's mother to Christmas dinner, is overcome by daring (behold the great Whishaw's frantically roving eyes) and decides to quite simply (and erotically) reach across the table and touch Fanny's hand. Together, these scenes paint John as a man who felt, perhaps neurotically, that in order to survive and be relevant as an artist he had to shun love.

Campion's beak-nosed actors inhabit the film's handsome world with ease, as if they were actual transplants from the early part of the 19th century, but her craft, more than ever suggesting Terrence Malick's own, is prone to purpleness. Fanny's love is just as immersive as John's verse, and in some of the film's more (literally) breathtaking sequences, Fanny is seen to be either high on John's love or asphyxiated by the lack of it, but during an extended sequence in which Fanny fills her room with butterflies, suggesting the influence of Live's "Lightning Crashes" music video, Campion indulges in callow imagery to convey how Fanny wallows in self-pity. But even after Fanny has been fully reduced to a martyr, haunting the woods outside the home she briefly shared with John as if she were Catherine from Wuthering Heights, one still relishes Campion's artistry, warts and all, because of the risks it takes, recalling the wonky, unconventional, and dreamlike beauty of Keats's verses but also the meticulous stitching of a hem.

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A positive review from THE VILLAGE VOICE (though no rave at all)...

By J. Hoberman
Tuesday, September 15th 2009 at 1:58pm

Set in the bucolic suburbs of early-19th-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion's Bright Star recounts the love affair between a tubercular young poet and the fashionable teenager next door. It's more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic—but no less touching for that.

Fanny Brawne (Australian actress Abbie Cornish) is a self-assured, imperious girl who makes her entrance in a dress of her own design, accessorized with a bright red, yellow-plumed stovepipe hat. Lippy as well as eye-catching, she immediately gets sassy with the self-important scribblers, John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), who rent the house across the way. Brown, an irascible, hairy Scot in hideous checked trousers, will be her rival for the attentions of Keats, whom, as Fanny discovers, is not only good-looking and sensitive but also the greatest unknown writer in England.

Still, it initially seems as if Bright Star might be about a girl genius. Fanny is, as she informs the poets, a creative personality in her own right and more successful than they are. (Did she really invent the pleated skirt, the triple-petal mushroom collar, DIY fashion?) Her outfits are invariably conceptual works of art, while the unimaginative writers always wear the same dreary thing—the girl's interest in Keats is signaled when she opines that he would look well in blue velvet.

As played by Whishaw (Keith Richards in a 2005 Rolling Stones biopic and the most poetical of Dylan's avatars in I'm Not There), Keats is clearly a proto–rock star—driven, yet lovable, and always attuned to himself. Mr. Keats and Miss Brawne make a fabulous couple: It's a pleasure to watch and, for the most part, listen to them. Her emphatically smooth brow and his artfully tousled hair seem designed to counterpoint the turbulence beneath their restraint. This emotional turmoil is evident in Keats's famously jealous love letters but, Fanny's competition with Brown aside, it is mainly manifested here in material problems. Keats's lack of professional prospects and poor health ensure that these super-adolescent lovers can never marry and thus consummate their love.

Keats argued against an art founded on certainty. However, Bright Star has little interest in mystery—or even ambivalence. Keats's involvement with Fanny churned up all manner of demons, including the witchy femmes fatale of "Lamia" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." But when, late in the movie, Campion has the couple quote the latter to each other in precise call-and-response, rather than in a fevered outburst of erotic obsession, it becomes a decorous meditation on mortality.

Campion's self-contained Fanny is hardly the manic minx that Keats described in a letter to his brother: "Her shape is very graceful and so are her movements. . . . She is not seventeen—but she is ignorant—monstrous in her behavior flying out in all directions." The poet deemed the disturbing Miss Brawne "beautiful and elegant," yet "silly, fashionable, and strange." That could describe some of Campion's earlier films—Sweetie, Holy Smoke!, even her perversely skewed Henry James adaptation, Portrait of a Lady—but not Bright Star. There's no weirdness here, despite the jarringly humid sensuality of the scene in which a lovesick Fanny transforms her bedroom into a butterfly terrarium.

Bright Star is a movie of few discords, least of all in Mark Bradshaw's faux-Baroque score. England 1818 seems like a Fragonard garden, the pastoral height of civilization. Conversation is witty; summer feels eternal. Zephyrs cool the heat, and classical compositions are animated by the adorable little girl (adorably named Toots) who dances attendance on the lovers. Their passion is both impossibly mad and hopelessly bourgeois—and as artfully turned-out as one of Fanny's outfits.

Bright Star, which might have been adapted from the Jane Austen novel that Emily Brontë never wrote, creates its own hermetic world. The requisite end titles suggest that Fanny consecrated her life to Keats's memory; in fact, she married and had three children who eventually became rich on the sale of the letters she sensibly saved. Shadowed by the knowledge of love's evanescence, this is a movie of undeniable pathos. But that does not make it sublime.

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An A- review from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

By Lisa Schwarzbaum

In the sensual and womanly-wise period drama Bright Star, Abbie Cornish looks at once demure and succulent in astonishing peony-colored garments as Fanny Brawne, while Ben Whishaw, in a teal waistcoat, is a vision of 19th-century emo tubercular hotness as the great Romantic poet John Keats. In life, Brawne was the girl next door who loved Keats deeply; the two were engaged when the poet died in Italy, coughing blood, at the age of 25. Today Brawne is remembered mostly as the recipient of passionate Keatsian love letters. (His poem ''Bright Star'' was dedicated to her.)

But in Jane Campion's quiet, luscious, stately meditation, an empathetic identification with Brawne's view of the world is tied to the filmmaker's thematic interest in young love (especially seen from a girl's point of view), the creative process, and the meaning of poetry. Brawne, a talented seamstress who found artistic expression in designing her own clothes, may have lived in an age of restrictive garments and equally restrictive rules of feminine conduct. But Campion's big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish's lovely, openhearted performance — and Whishaw's well-matched response — results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love. A-

A very positive review from THE NEW YORK TIMES...

Keats and His Beloved in an Ode to Hot English Chastity

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: September 16, 2009

John Keats was a Romantic poet. “Bright Star,” which tells the tale of Keats and Fanny Brawne, the love of his short life, is a romantic movie. The vernacular of popular culture and the somewhat specialized language of literary history assign different meanings to that word, but the achievement of Jane Campion’s learned and ravishing new film is to fuse them, to trace the comminglings and collisions of poetic creation and amatory passion.

This is a risky project, not least because a bog of cliché and fallacy lies between the filmmaker and her goal. In the first decades of the 19th century, some poets may have been like movie stars, but the lives of the poets have been, in general, badly served on film, either neglected altogether or puffed up with sentiment and solemnity. The Regency period, moreover, serves too many lazy, prestige-minded directors as a convenient vintage clothing store. And there are times in “Bright Star” when Keats, played by the pale and skinny British actor Ben Whishaw (“Perfume,” “I’m Not There”), trembles on the edge of caricature. He broods; he coughs (signaling the tuberculosis that will soon kill him); he looks dreamily at flowers and trees and rocks.

But these moments, rather than feeling studied or obvious, arrive with startling keenness and disarming beauty, much in the way that Keats’s own lyrics do. His verses can at first seem ornate and sentimental, but on repeated readings, they have a way of gaining in force and freshness. The music is so intricate and artificial, even as the emotions it carries seem natural and spontaneous. And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Keats’s genius — underestimated by many of the critics of his time, championed by a loyal coterie of literary friends — is the fixed point around which “Bright Star” orbits. Its animating force, however, is the infatuation that envelops Keats and Brawne in their early meetings and grows, over the subsequent months, into a sustaining and tormenting love. Mr. Keats, as his lover decorously calls him, is diffident and uneasy at times, but also witty, sly and steadfast. The movie really belongs to Brawne, played with mesmerizing vitality and heart-stopping grace by Abbie Cornish.

Ms. Cornish, an Australian actress whose previous films include “Stop-Loss,” “Candy” and “Somersault,” has, at 27, achieved a mixture of unguardedness and self-control matched by few actresses of any age or nationality. She’s as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be.

Fanny, the eldest daughter of a distracted widow (Kerry Fox), has some of the spirited cleverness of a Jane Austen heroine. A gifted seamstress, she prides herself on her forward-looking fashion sense and her independence. She is also vain, insecure and capable of throwing herself headlong into the apparent folly of adoring a dying and penniless poet, something no sensible Austen character would ever do.

If it were just the poet and his beloved, “Bright Star” might collapse in swooning and sighing, or into the static rhythms of a love poem. And while there are passages of extraordinary lyricism — butterflies, fields of flowers, fluttering hands and beseeching glances — these are balanced by a rough, energetic worldliness. Lovers, like poets, may create their own realms of feeling and significance, but they do so in contention with the same reality that the rest of us inhabit.

The film’s designated reality principle is Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s friend, patron and collaborator and his main rival for Fanny’s attention. For Brown, Fanny is an irritant and a distraction, though the sarcastic intensity of their banter carries an interesting sexual charge of its own. In an Austen novel this friction would be resolved in matrimony, but “Bright Star,” following the crooked, shadowed path of biographical fact, has a different story to tell.

Brown and Keats are neighbors to the Brawne brood in Hampstead in 1818, when the story begins. In April of the following year the poets are occupying one-half of a house, with Fanny and her mother and siblings on the other side of the wall. After nine months Keats, in declining health, is dispatched to Italy by a committee of concerned friends, but until then he and Fanny consummate their love in every possible way except physically.

Ms. Campion is one of modern cinema’s great explorers of female sexuality, illuminating Sigmund Freud’s “dark continent” with skepticism, sympathy and occasional indignation. “Bright Star” could easily have become a dark, simple fable of repression, since modern audiences like nothing better than to be assured that our social order is freer and more enlightened than any that came before. But Fanny and Keats are modern too, and though the mores of their time constrain them, they nonetheless regard themselves as free.

The film is hardly blind to the sexual hypocrisy that surrounds them. Fanny can’t marry Keats because of his poverty, but Brown blithely crosses class lines to have some fun with (and impregnate) a naïve and illiterate young household servant (Antonia Campbell-Hughes). That Fanny and Keats must sublimate their longings in letters, poems and conversations seems cruel, but they make the best of it. As does Ms. Campion: a sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema.

The heat of that moment and others like it deliver “Bright Star” from the tidy prison of period costume drama. Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.

A *** out of **** review from Claudia Puig in USA TODAY...

More admirable than emotionally affecting, Bright Star unequivocally celebrates the joys of poetry.

Those who love language and particularly poetic verse will savor the dialogue, as well as the visual splendor of the film. With its gorgeously framed shots and superb craftsmanship, Bright Star is a thing of beauty.

But as a transcendent romance, it doesn't fully deliver, coming across as restrained and detached, rather than captivating.

This portrait of the doomed three-year love affair between early 19th-century British poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and the fashionista girl next door, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), is more potent in letters and written verse than in physical sparks. In fact, some of the better moments involve Keats and Brawne reciting Keats' poetry or lovelorn missives.

Director Jane Campion's elegantly photographed, slow-moving and moody period drama lacks the transcendent passion so eloquently captured in Keats' work.

Initially, seamstress Fanny is all about fashion. The ultra-sensitive Keats initially dismisses her as a rather vapid "minxstress"— she's an avid fans of formal dances, and she gets lots of invitations, while Keats stands by, broodingly.

Then he is touched when she responds with unexpected compassion to the news of his brother's serious illness. A friendship builds slowly into love. Their ardor borders on obsession, with Fanny dramatically threatening suicide when separated from Keats.

Fanny's mother (Kerry Fox) had hoped her daughter would find a suitable, moneyed husband. Keats is essentially broke, relying on the kindness of friends and patrons. Aware of these financial limitations and seemingly jealous of their relationship, Keats' best friend and colleague, Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), does his best to undermine the lovers' bond.

The film's regard for poetry trumps its depiction of bridled passion and thwarts the viewers' complete investment by offering limited insight into Keats' complex character and even less into Fannie's soul, particularly her evolution from party girl to literary devotee.

The cinematography, production design and costumes are flawlessly rendered, as are the selections of Keats' poetry. The final months of Keats' too-short life are moving, though the film's deliberate pace undercuts the climactic potency.

The notion of such intense love finding only a chaste expression is undeniably intriguing. Befitting its time, it allows for plenty of well-crafted verbal expressions of heartfelt devotion, but only a few kisses.

No one could write a love poem or proclaim his affections as luminously like Keats. He grew gravely ill and died at only 25. What the film does best is remind us of the brilliance of Keats? flame and how it was extinguished far too early.

A *** out of **** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...

What do you say about a 25-year-old British poet who died? If you're Jane Campion and the poet is John Keats, you can go with the love letters Keats (Ben Whishaw) wrote to Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) before consumption ended his life in Italy in 1821. But Campion, in films as diverse as The Piano and In the Cut, has always been intrigued by the space that time, class and culture puts between lovers and the feelings they can't articulate. And so Bright Star is the New Zealand writer-director's raw, sensual attempt to render Keats as experienced by a young girl who couldn't understand the genius of his verse.

It works like a charm. The rigidity of life in Hampstead, where Fanny and her family live next door to the penniless Keats and his mentor, Mr. Brown (Paul Schneider), only amps the intensity of the emotions thwarted by their formal dress and society's rules. Sex? There isn't any between Keats and Fanny. Only Brown's go at a housemaid brings a carnal intrusion. For Campion, it's nature that represents the swoons and storms of this unrequited romance. The film, shot by the gifted Greig Fraser, is a thing of beauty to match the snippets of Keats we hear on the soundtrack. But the film would remain a concept without the right actors to give it flesh and blood. Whishaw lets us into Keats' secret, anguished heart. And Cornish is glorious, making Fanny a force of womanhood able to take on Brown (Schneider is a sharply witty irritant) when he tries to break the connection between her and her beloved. Cornish catches the fertile mind that Fanny poignantly tries to nurture, knowing she'll grow closer to Keats by deciphering the words that possess him. A literate, lyrical love story in the age of Hollywood crass. I must be dreaming.

A rave from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES...

By Kenneth Turan FILM CRITIC >>>

"Bright Star" satisfies a hunger we may not have known we had, a hunger for an exquisitely done, emotional love story that marries heartbreaking passion to formidable filmmaking restraint, all in the service of an unapologetically romantic belief in "the holiness of the heart's affections."

The affections in question are those of the poet who wrote those words, John Keats, perhaps the greatest of England's 19th century Romantics, and Fanny Brawne, literally the girl next door. They met in 1818, when Keats was 23 and Brawne 18, a little more than two years before his dreadful death from tuberculosis. The intensity of their fervent connection brought forth some of Keats' greatest work, including the poem that gives the piece its title, and motivated filmmaker Jane Campion to create one of the most moving, most transporting love stories in memory.

Campion, who won an Oscar for writing "The Piano," which she also directed, has not always wanted her filmmaking to be as pulled-back as it is here. But, in part inspired by the French master Robert Bresson's unhurried and magisterial "A Man Escaped," she understood that the Keats-Brawne love affair was such an emotional juggernaut that telling it in a restrained way only increased its power.

Essential in this was the superb work of Australia's Abbie Cornish and Britain's Ben Whishaw, whom Campion boldly cast as inseparable lovers without their having met each other. Her gamble paid off: Though not widely known in this country, the performers' naturalness and ability allow them to function as our contemporaries and as residents of the story's removed time and place. And they so know how to be in love on screen that they make this chaste relationship burn like fire.

Campion was moved to write the "Bright Star" screenplay by reading about the Keats-Brawne relationship in Andrew Motion's magisterial 1997 biography, and though the film is true to the story's major events and situations, Campion has felt free, as she needed to, to invent incident and dialogue to imaginatively flesh out the story and make it come alive.

This starts with the film's opening credits, which run over unexpected close-ups of a needle and cloth. Motion's biography describes Brawne as "a diligent student of fashion" who loved dressmaking, and so Brawne presents herself on screen, in a series of impeccable outfits, as a smart, confident young woman who is fierce and unapologetic about being "hopelessly addicted" to the latest in clothing styles, up to and including triple-pleated collars.

Brawne makes that statement to the Scotsman Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), one of her family's neighbors in the village of Hampstead Heath, at the time on the far outskirts of London. Clearly there is bad blood between them: Brawne, angry about cutting remarks he has previously made about her fashionista tendencies, flatly refuses to shake his hand -- and it will only get worse.

Brown is himself a writer and a close friend of Keats, who is currently sharing quarters with him. Brawne is dispatched to bring the poet tea, and though they take notice of each other, neither is hit by a thunderbolt. He calls her "minx," and though she finds poetry too challenging, she becomes intrigued (as how could she not) by the man who wrote "a thing of beauty is a joy forever."

This potential romance makes no one happy, not Brawne's mother (Kerry Fox, who did "Angel at My Table" with Campion), who worries that the penniless Keats cannot marry without funds, and not Brown, who is frankly jealous of Keats' increasingly serious interest and will do almost anything to keep the poet away from someone he views as a lightweight who "makes a religion out of flirting."

Displaying a strong brogue, American actor Schneider is fearless in his portrayal of this puffed-up poetic thug, brazenly capturing the essence of a man whom one Keats authority called "a strange mixture of coarseness, kindness, cold-bloodedness and calculation."

Opposition or no opposition, nothing, aside from Keats' increasingly severe illness, can keep these two apart, especially when circumstances have them sharing the same house and, in a classic moment, simultaneously touching the thin bedroom wall that keeps them apart. It's a tribute to all concerned, especially the letter-perfect actors and the wonderful language Campion has given them, that this film holds us from first to last even though history has told us exactly how it will end.

As she did with "The Piano," Campion has placed her characters in a 19th century world that feels as tangible and lived in as our own. Working again with her longtime production and costume designer Janet Patterson, Campion demonstrates her gift for making the dailiness of distant lives vivid and convincing.

Despite being Campion's first film after a four-year break, "Bright Star" is masterfully put-together, made with confidence, intelligence and command. In collaboration with cinematographer Greig Fraser, Campion, who with "The Piano" was only the second woman to be nominated for the best director Oscar, has seen to it that no shot is anything but impeccably, and often inventively, composed. When an unconventional director takes on traditional material in a forthright style, the underlying creative tension invariably makes for exciting cinema.

Because Brawne and the nature of her feelings for the poet have remained contentious to Keatsians over all these years, Campion was clearly determined to make this a balanced relationship and to have Brawne be the equal romantic partner Keats' poetry and letters insist was the case, and in this as in all else she has succeeded.

As he was leaving on the trip to Italy from which he was never to return, Keats wrote to Brown, "The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond every thing horrible -- the sense of darkness coming over me -- I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." It takes this exceptional film to do justice to that stunning an image of romantic devotion and loss.

A rave review from Joe Morgenstern in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL...

In "Bright Star," a dramatization of the intense though unconsummated love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne, the filmmaker Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (apart from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress). Yet the effect is exhilarating, and deeply pleasurable. It's like the dive into a lake that Keats evokes to explain the experience of poetry. The point, he explains to Fanny, is not to get to the other side, but to luxuriate in the lake.

The most obvious source of pleasure is the film's heroine, about whom much has been written in the past two centuries, despite a scarcity of factual knowledge. What's never been in doubt is the depth of the poet's passion for Fanny; his love letters to her enjoy a special place in English literature. What we know about her, though, comes mainly from him, and it's more suggestive than definitive. His first impression, that of a stylish minx, gave way to adoration for a woman who, he said, could "concentrate my whole senses." Not a blank slate, then, but one with plenty of open spaces that Ms. Campion has filled in the course of a film that avoids any trace of musty reverence for a long-dead poet by concentrating our senses on the breathtaking girl next door.

In an earlier time this protofeminist creation might have been played by Katharine Hepburn. Happily for us she's played by Abbie Cornish, the Australian actress who, as I said in my Telluride preview last week, is as luminous as the star of the lyric poem, written by Keats for Fanny, that gives the film its title. Ms. Cornish's beauty is very much a part of the attraction, since her character is a shameless, vivacious flirt. (Watch her upstage a bedroom full of butterflies.) But so is her quick intelligence and her ease with heightened language, for this version of Fanny Brawne is something of an artist in her own right—a fashion designer before the term was coined—and something of an intellectual, albeit undeclared, even to herself.

If Fanny can't fathom the depths of Keats's writing at first—"Poems," she declares, "are a strain to work out"—she is eager and abundantly able to learn. If she can't understand his sexual reticence—to which he alludes, with welcome brevity, by saying "I'm not sure I have the right feelings toward women"—she loves him for the ardent and anguished man he is, as well as for his still-controversial literary gifts.

This is not, after all, the immortal Keats studied in books, but John Keats, an impoverished and all-too-mortal writer who has contracted tuberculosis and is soon to die at the age of 25. He's played by Ben Whishaw, who, in his own artful, tactful way, matches Abbie Cornish's vivacity with a delicacy that conceals a soaring spirit. "There's a holiness to the heart's affection," Keats says angrily to his Scottish friend Charles Brown, who has mocked Fanny by sending her a flirtatious valentine. The line is a tricky one, its pitfall being sanctimoniousness, but Mr. Whishaw delivers it with an understated urgency that colors every moment of his beautiful performance.

Tact isn't Charles Brown's style. Thanks to an inspired stroke of casting, he's portrayed by the American actor Paul Schneider, who makes him an enormously entertaining boor, not to mention a hostile, supercilious clown dedicated to dominating Keats's life in the name of protecting him from such distractions as Fanny's love. In a film distinguished by—though never encumbered by—exquisite taste, Mr. Schneider's raunchy rambunctiousness is a tonic.

Schneider's getting great reviews. I hope he can get support for a nomination.

Supporting Actor this year is refreshingly full of unknown, unconventional and lesser-known contenders (Mackie, Waltz, McKay, Schneider, Kind, Capaldi etc)

quote:

Originally posted by puxzkkx:
Schneider's getting great reviews. I hope he can get support for a nomination.

Supporting Actor this year is refreshingly full of unknown, unconventional and lesser-known contenders (Mackie, Waltz, McKay, Schneider, Kind, Capaldi etc)

Who are McKay and Capaldi and what movies are they in?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,

Christian McKay is in Me and Orson Welles & Peter Capaldi is in In the Loop.

quote:

Originally posted by puxzkkx:
Christian McKay is in Me and Orson Welles & Peter Capaldi is in In the Loop.

"In the Loop" was released on VOD and in theatres in NYC on the same day so it will not be eligible for Oscars. I saw it ON DEMAND and thought it extremely clever but would also say Capaldi is a bit of a stretch as supporting. If the film has a lead, it is him.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,

A *** out of *** from the ASSOCIATED PRESS...

By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Critic

LOS ANGELES – In telling the story of the final years in the brief life of poet John Keats, "Bright Star" very easily could have been a stuffy, period costume drama.

Instead, writer-director Jane Campion has fashioned a fascinating mix of contradictions. Her film is at once gritty and ethereal, grounded and romantic, quaint and contemporary. Those appealing contrasts extend to the casting choices, as well, with the pale, reserved Ben Whishaw playing off the vibrant, assured Abbie Cornish.

One of the smartest moves Campion made was to focus on a short, pivotal period for Keats, rather than trying to construct a comprehensive (and potentially cursory) biopic. "Bright Star" follows the three-year relationship that began in 1818 between the writer and Fanny Brawne, his next-door neighbor in Hampstead, north London. It was a time of great productivity for him, as we'd later come to appreciate, but it's also when he experienced his only true love.

Fanny, a flirty and style-obsessed 18-year-old, may not seem like an ideal fit for the 23-year-old Keats at first — and his collaborator Charles Brown, played by a brash and scene-stealing Paul Schneider, does his best to exert his territoriality and keep them apart. As Fanny states in her typically blunt way after reading Keats' work for the first time, "I wanted to adore it." But in time they become fascinated by the foreignness of each other, until they eventually become inseparable.

Physically, they never progress beyond hand-holding and a few chaste kisses, but the charge those acts carry is palpable. Like the dreamy white light that streams in from the windows of Fanny's country home, the emotion of "Bright Star" bursts through the stillness and grabs you.

It's a gorgeous, sensual film (shot by cinematographer Greig Fraser), with pastoral touches reminiscent of Terrence Malick — and similar to his work, it might actually be too quiet at times. Lying in a field of purple flowers or strolling through the woods conveys a sense of impressionistic melancholy. Back to reality, Keats and Fanny press their palms and ears to the wall that separates their bedrooms, just to feel near each other.

Of course, they can never marry. This is one of the more obvious elements of "Bright Star." Fanny, who designs clothes and lives at home with her widowed mother (Kerry Fox), younger brother Samuel (Thomas Brodie Sangster) and younger sister Toots (the adorable Edie Martin), must wind up with a man who's more financially established, not a penniless poet. And so we know their love is doomed, long before Keats lets loose his first hacking coughs of the tuberculosis that will claim him at 25.

Campion depicts all this from Fanny's perspective. Keats' words — from some of his best-known poems, including "Endymion," "Ode to a Nightingale" and the titular, Fanny-inspired "Bright Star" — crop up organically throughout the picture, rather than arriving in big, stagy recitations. But the ache of young love is all hers, and as our guide, Cornish provides a compelling directness.

They've frumped her up a bit here from the blonde good looks she's exuded in previous films like "Stop-Loss" and even "Candy," in which she played a junkie opposite Heath Ledger. But the innocence and intensity of her character's love for Keats shines through and makes "Bright Star" surprisingly accessible.

"Bright Star," an Apparition release, is rated PG for thematic elements, some sensuality, brief language and incidental smoking. Running time: 119 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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A ***1/2 review from Roger Ebert...

John Keats wasn't meekly posing as a Romantic poet. He was the real thing, and the last born of the group that also included Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. He died at 25 and remains forever young.

The great and only love of his life was Fanny Brawne, the daughter of his landlady. He lived with his friend, Charles Brown, and she with her mother, sister and brother in the two halves of a Hampstead cottage so small, it gives meaning to the phrase "living in each other's pockets." Their love was grand and poetic and -- apart from some sweet kisses -- platonic, for he had neither the means nor the health to propose marriage, and they were not moved to violate the moral code of what was not yet quite the Victorian era.

Jane Campion's beautiful, wistful film "Bright Star" shows them frozen in courtship, like the young man Keats wrote about in "Ode on a Grecian Urn": the youth who is immortalized forever in pursuit of a maid he is destined never to catch.

He could have been writing about himself and Fanny:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -- yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

It is almost as if they were spiritually inflamed by their doomed love. She was not shy but she was proper, and he loved her, but perhaps he had some difficulty in thinking of her as physical. When his younger brother Tom died and his own health began to fail, he immortalized his loss of that which he had never possessed. (From his deathbed in Italy, however, he did indeed write his friend Brown that he wished he had "had her" when he had a chance.) Dr. Johnson observed to Mr. Boswell, "Marriage, sir, is a state with few pleasures. Chastity, with none." Yet Keats and Fanny seemed quite pleased enough.

I have visited Keats House many times and I can tell you it is shocking small. The dividing wall between the two households was knocked out in the mid-1880s, but propriety must have erected a stouter wall. In "Bright Star," John and Fanny court and flirt as if they live in neighboring counties. It's to Campion's credit that she doesn't heat up the story or go for easy emotional payoffs, and we're spared even the pathetic deathbed scene that another director might have felt necessary.

The key figure is Fanny, played by Abbie Cornish with effervescence. "I confess I do not find your poems easy," she tells Keats (Ben Whishaw). But she studies them earnestly, with a touching faith that they must contain clues to the stirrings in her heart. He requires her as a muse. For a reader, he has the bearded, gruff Brown (Paul Schneider), possessive, demanding, a taskmaster. Brown is hostile to Fanny's appeal to his friend and resents it when she interrupts them "working," which seems to consist of him scowling morosely at a manuscript while Keats idly dreams. Brown is a poet himself, but to his credit, he recognizes the better craftsman and behaves like a coach or an agent.

There might be some question whether Brown felt sexual stirrings of his own involving Keats, but I think he is oblivious to such a possibility. He knows the real thing, he wonders if Keats would daydream his career away, as always at his back, he hears time's winged chariot hurrying near. When Keats leaves for Italy, it is Brown who accompanies him -- not Fanny, of course, who waits forlornly for the postman to approach down the little lane beneath the tree where Keats perhaps heard the nightingale sing. (The tree now growing on the spot is not the same one, but don't tell everyone.)

What Campion does is seek visual beauty to match Keats' verbal beauty. There is a shot here of Fanny in a meadow of blue flowers that is so enthralling it beggars description.

Hampstead in those days was a village on the slopes north of London, almost rural, where shepherds could graze their flocks on the public land of Hampstead Heath. Coleridge lived not far way in Highgate, and the two met during their rambles on the heath. To support oneself seems to have been relatively possible, despite Dickens' portraits of poverty at the time. Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) observes to her daughter that he has "no living and no income," the volumes of verse brought in only a few pounds, but when it is time for Keats to live in Italy, he finds the means. It appears that an English gentleman could support himself on air and credit.

It is famously impossible for the act of writing to be made cinematic. How long can we watch someone staring at a blank sheet of paper? It is equally unenlightening to show the writer seeing something and dashing off to scribble down impassioned words while we hear him reading them in his mind. Campion knows all this, and knows, too, that without the poetry, John Keats is only a moonstruck young man. How she works in the words is one of the subtle beauties of the film. And over the end credits, Whishaw reads the ode, and you will want to stay.

A rave from Kenneth Turan in THE LOS ANGELES TIMES...

By Kenneth Turan FILM CRITIC >>>

"Bright Star" satisfies a hunger we may not have known we had, a hunger for an exquisitely done, emotional love story that marries heartbreaking passion to formidable filmmaking restraint, all in the service of an unapologetically romantic belief in "the holiness of the heart's affections."

The affections in question are those of the poet who wrote those words, John Keats, perhaps the greatest of England's 19th century Romantics, and Fanny Brawne, literally the girl next door. They met in 1818, when Keats was 23 and Brawne 18, a little more than two years before his dreadful death from tuberculosis. The intensity of their fervent connection brought forth some of Keats' greatest work, including the poem that gives the piece its title, and motivated filmmaker Jane Campion to create one of the most moving, most transporting love stories in memory.

Campion, who won an Oscar for writing "The Piano," which she also directed, has not always wanted her filmmaking to be as pulled-back as it is here. But, in part inspired by the French master Robert Bresson's unhurried and magisterial "A Man Escaped," she understood that the Keats-Brawne love affair was such an emotional juggernaut that telling it in a restrained way only increased its power.

Essential in this was the superb work of Australia's Abbie Cornish and Britain's Ben Whishaw, whom Campion boldly cast as inseparable lovers without their having met each other. Her gamble paid off: Though not widely known in this country, the performers' naturalness and ability allow them to function as our contemporaries and as residents of the story's removed time and place. And they so know how to be in love on screen that they make this chaste relationship burn like fire.

Campion was moved to write the "Bright Star" screenplay by reading about the Keats-Brawne relationship in Andrew Motion's magisterial 1997 biography, and though the film is true to the story's major events and situations, Campion has felt free, as she needed to, to invent incident and dialogue to imaginatively flesh out the story and make it come alive.

This starts with the film's opening credits, which run over unexpected close-ups of a needle and cloth. Motion's biography describes Brawne as "a diligent student of fashion" who loved dressmaking, and so Brawne presents herself on screen, in a series of impeccable outfits, as a smart, confident young woman who is fierce and unapologetic about being "hopelessly addicted" to the latest in clothing styles, up to and including triple-pleated collars.

Brawne makes that statement to the Scotsman Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), one of her family's neighbors in the village of Hampstead Heath, at the time on the far outskirts of London. Clearly there is bad blood between them: Brawne, angry about cutting remarks he has previously made about her fashionista tendencies, flatly refuses to shake his hand -- and it will only get worse.

Brown is himself a writer and a close friend of Keats, who is currently sharing quarters with him. Brawne is dispatched to bring the poet tea, and though they take notice of each other, neither is hit by a thunderbolt. He calls her "minx," and though she finds poetry too challenging, she becomes intrigued (as how could she not) by the man who wrote "a thing of beauty is a joy forever."

This potential romance makes no one happy, not Brawne's mother (Kerry Fox, who did "Angel at My Table" with Campion), who worries that the penniless Keats cannot marry without funds, and not Brown, who is frankly jealous of Keats' increasingly serious interest and will do almost anything to keep the poet away from someone he views as a lightweight who "makes a religion out of flirting."

Displaying a strong brogue, American actor Schneider is fearless in his portrayal of this puffed-up poetic thug, brazenly capturing the essence of a man whom one Keats authority called "a strange mixture of coarseness, kindness, cold-bloodedness and calculation."

Opposition or no opposition, nothing, aside from Keats' increasingly severe illness, can keep these two apart, especially when circumstances have them sharing the same house and, in a classic moment, simultaneously touching the thin bedroom wall that keeps them apart. It's a tribute to all concerned, especially the letter-perfect actors and the wonderful language Campion has given them, that this film holds us from first to last even though history has told us exactly how it will end.

As she did with "The Piano," Campion has placed her characters in a 19th century world that feels as tangible and lived in as our own. Working again with her longtime production and costume designer Janet Patterson, Campion demonstrates her gift for making the dailiness of distant lives vivid and convincing.

Despite being Campion's first film after a four-year break, "Bright Star" is masterfully put-together, made with confidence, intelligence and command. In collaboration with cinematographer Greig Fraser, Campion, who with "The Piano" was only the second woman to be nominated for the best director Oscar, has seen to it that no shot is anything but impeccably, and often inventively, composed. When an unconventional director takes on traditional material in a forthright style, the underlying creative tension invariably makes for exciting cinema.

Because Brawne and the nature of her feelings for the poet have remained contentious to Keatsians over all these years, Campion was clearly determined to make this a balanced relationship and to have Brawne be the equal romantic partner Keats' poetry and letters insist was the case, and in this as in all else she has succeeded.

As he was leaving on the trip to Italy from which he was never to return, Keats wrote to Brown, "The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond every thing horrible -- the sense of darkness coming over me -- I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." It takes this exceptional film to do justice to that stunning an image of romantic devotion and loss.

Moving the recent exchanges on this from the Coco thread to here:

Posted September 28, 2009 02:25 PM Hide Post
More interested on whether Pacinofan thinks Bright Star will overcome its weak public reaction to gain traction with Academy members (perhaps better on that film's thread).
Posts: 16047 | Registered: January 26, 2005

Ignored post by seanflynn posted September 28, 2009 02:25 PM Show Post

pacinofan Posted September 28, 2009 02:34 PM Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by seanflynn:
More interested on whether Pacinofan thinks Bright Star will overcome its weak public reaction to gain traction with Academy members (perhaps better on that film's thread).


It is a much better and much better reviewed film. I think it's best chance to build Oscar traction is to win best picture from the notoriously Anglophilic and literary National Board of Review. As it totally seems like their kind of film that could very well happen. With ten nominees I still see it getting into the best picture line-up... maybe without Jane Campion as a directing nominee unless critics' awards save her. It is likely very competitive in the categories of art direction, cinematography, costumes and score. Believe Abbie Cornish will be an Oscar nominee. Ben Wishaw is just as good but doubt he will be in the race.
Posts: 25707 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003

Ignored post by pacinofan posted September 28, 2009 02:34 PM Show Post

seanflynn
Not always right, but no fool either
Posted September 28, 2009 02:41 PM Hide Post
I expect to like it a lot, but honestly have been so far hearing a (limited) mixed - or at least mildly disappointed - reaction from the small sampling of members I've talked to.

I know the situations aren't totally comparable, but why would Cornish be so likely when Sally Hawkins even with her wins couldn't make it into the race?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn, September 28, 2009 02:43 PM
Posts: 16047 | Registered: January 26, 2005

Ignored post by seanflynn posted September 28, 2009 02:41 PM Show Post

pacinofan Posted September 28, 2009 02:49 PM Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by seanflynn:
I expect to like it a lot, but honestly have been so far hearing a (limited) mixed - or at least mildly disappointed - reaction from the small sampling of members I've talked to.

I know the situations aren't totally comparable, but why would Cornish be so likely when Sally Hawkins even with her wins couldn't make it into the race?


Cornish is better known than the completely unknown Sally Hawkins for one... even if she is best known for breaking up Reese Witherspoon's marriage.

I also think most Oscar viewers will like "Bright Star", the opinions from your friends suggest otherwise but I stand by it, while "Happy-Go-Lucky" annoyed the hell out of as many people as likely enjoyed it.

I think Abbie Cornish will ultimately make the top five. I still think she is LESS likely to make it than Meryl Streep, Carrey Mulligan and Gabourey Sidibe.
Posts: 25707 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003

Ignored post by pacinofan posted September 28, 2009 02:49 PM Show Post

seanflynn
Not always right, but no fool either
Posted September 28, 2009 02:53 PM Hide Post
I follow general gossip, but this frankly is the first time I'd connected her with the Witherspoon breakup to be honest. And although I've seen her, she doesn't really register with me, so I'm assuming even less so with the overwhelming majority of acting branch members.

I think she needs to win at least one significant award to be likely to be nominated. Obviously, GG and more so SAG nominations would help. But the film just is not clicking, and that is going to hurt her chances big time.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn, September 28, 2009 02:54 PM
Posts: 16047 | Registered: January 26, 2005

Ignored post by seanflynn posted September 28, 2009 02:53 PM Show Post

pacinofan Posted September 28, 2009 02:57 PM Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by seanflynn:
I follow general gossip, but this frankly is the first time I'd connect her with the Witherspoon breakup to be honest. And although I've seen her, she doesn't really register with me, so I'm assuming even less so with the overwhelming majority of acting branch members.

I think she needs to win at least one significant award to be likely to be nominated. Obviously, GG and more so SAG nominations would help. But the film just is not clicking, and that is going to hurt her chances big time.


I guess the numbers do not lie but I saw it Saturday night in LA at a large screening room at the Landmark and the theatre was full except for some seats in the front row. I got to the film a half hour ahead but because people book their tickets online and they are assigned seats I was stuck in the second row.
Posts: 25707 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003

Ignored post by pacinofan posted September 28, 2009 02:57 PM Show Post

Pucifer Posted September 28, 2009 03:05 PM Hide Post
UMM off-topic.
Posts: 5534 | Registered: July 05, 2008

Ignored post by Pucifer posted September 28, 2009 03:05 PM Show Post

seanflynn
Not always right, but no fool either
Posted September 28, 2009 03:08 PM Hide Post
quote:
I guess the numbers do not lie but I saw it Saturday night in LA at a large screening room at the Landmark and the theatre was full except for some seats in the front row. I got to the film a half hour ahead but because people book their tickets online and they are assigned seats I was stuck in the second row.


Screens vary in size of course (not sure which one this played on, but they only have a couple large ones, and only one print; Capitalism clearly had the big impact screens.

Also Saturday mid-evening usually is the biggest show of the week.