Somewhere within Jane Campion's unmistakable gift for filmmaking resides a diffidence. She would rather dreamily contemplate her characters than sound their depths. Perhaps there is a voice inside her head insinuating that too much motivation hunting becomes a violation, a psychological presumptuousness. Or is it simply that Campion needs a scriptwriter to start the probing for her? For me, her best work remains An Angel at My Table, adapted from Janet Frame's autobiography by the talented Laura Jones. Jones's script showed no compunction about letting us see precisely how and why Angel's heroine found herself at odds with society, and how she achieved mental equipoise and self-respect through the exercise of her literary talent. Campion's visualization of Jones's writing infused the story with mystery and even spirituality, and none of it was achieved by withholding psychological insight.
The rest of Campion's work suffers from a weird vagueness. The Piano, universally acclaimed and laden with prizes, is still for me (after two viewings) a ditzy Down Under version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, miscast and artily filmed, with the heroine's self-imposed muteness a mere gimmick. In the Cut? An impossible project because the plot became hokey crime melodrama when divorced from the language of Susanna Moore's book. Holy Smoke? A battle of the sexes in which Campion so unquestioningly favored her heroine that true battle was never joined. The director wrote or co-wrote all three films, but for The Portrait of a Lady, she again had Laura Jones as adaptor. Henry James's plot was neatly spanned and the dialogue was excellent, but since neither Jones nor Campion (I assume) could accept the idea that Isabel Archer kept herself in a quicksand of a marriage for the sake of honor, the beautifully made movie finally became a study of neurosis rather than a full-blown portrait.
That said, Bright Star, written and directed by Campion, is her best work since An Angel at My Table. Though it flags in its last half-hour, the film is a visual triumph and a feat of historical imagining. Taking place in the English village of Hampstead from 1818 to 1821, this is the story of the romance of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. It begins with the dressmaker and the poet already strongly attracted to each other but being pulled apart by Keats's friend, the businessman and poetaster Charles Brown, who is so neurotically protective of his friend (and perhaps unconsciously attracted to him) that he insists a romance could only distract Keats from his art. The ardency of the lovers finally defeats Brown, but other obstacles intrude: their perilous finances, Keats's suspicion that Brawne is toying with him, her suspicion that he is patronizing her, his concern to use his dwindling energy for his verse, her deference to her mother's wishes and economic needs, and, finally, his fatal tuberculosis.
Like all really good period films, Bright Star avoids both antiquarian stuffiness and kitsch, and makes us feel both the otherness of the past and its occasional resemblance to our time. These people have just lived through the tumultuous era of the Napoleonic Wars but are still many years short of the solidity of Victoria's reign. They may sit and stand more stiffly than we do because of layers of thick clothing, yet they express themselves with a freedom, even a vehemence, that may surprise viewers whose mental image of nineteenth-century England is tied to Victorian novels.
To be sure, the lovers observe decorum and practice a chastity strange to most modern lovers. There is a sense of accepted postponement here and a sense of accountability to one's family and to society. Keats, who is genuinely shocked when Brown gets a servant pregnant, passionately desires Fanny but is also passionately honorable: his physical desire is inextricable from his desire for marriage. As for Fanny, her longings are equal to his but she knows that the money she earns as a seamstress, though adequate for her mother's household, might not be enough for the sickly Keats and any children they might have. (The movie doesn't tell us that Keats was trained as an apothecary; the story takes place when Keats was too ill to earn a living from a regular job.)
Nevertheless, they are lovers. When Fanny and John, fully clothed, lie on her bed with their bodies pressed together, Campion and her actors make us feel the heat and ache of desire. And the comic conspiracy of all lovers is here: to observe the world with two pairs of eyes and one mind, to play tricks on it and laugh at it, to burst its grapes upon their palates. There is a marvelously funny scene in which John and Fanny, strolling behind her little sister, freeze into statues every time the child looks behind her. Campion stages it as an impromptu ballet, and you can sense how the little girl, at first annoyed, gets caught up in the improvisation.
While Campion and her cinematographer, Greig Fraser, give us interiors that recall Vermeer, their exteriors make us feel the peculiar rainy island beauty of England, the continual alternation of sunshine and thin rain that's a perfect accompaniment for the Keats-Brawne affair. Also at play here is a subtle design employing white backgrounds (snow, white walls, blossoms, muslin curtains) against which Campion places vividly colored costumes or foliage. This isn't mere eye candy. The whiteness here recalls (however modestly) Melville's horror of whiteness in Moby-Dick, the whiteness of nothingness, of extinction, toward which the dying poet is traveling, while the colors the director puts in the foreground are the splashes of life that the poet so desperately wants to cling to, the joy that the beautiful and robust Fanny embodies.
So why does this fine film go a little slack in its last thirty minutes or so? First, the most obviously dramatic stuff, the antagonism between Brown and Fanny, comes right at the beginning, leaving everything that follows limp by comparison. Paul Schneider, burly and bearded, makes Brown hilariously gloating in his possessiveness, yet believably devoted, too. Abbie Cornish, as Fanny, has her best moments with him, for Brown's enmity rouses both the character's and the actress's spunk. Once Brown recedes from the action, Cornish is used more as a model than as an actress. Fraser's lighting gives her an alabaster look, but her countenance doesn't offer the camera much variety of emotion.
Second, there's no dramatic shape to the later courtship scenes, and the sorrows and joys of the lovers begin to feel monotonous. For all its charm, the movie ceases to follow a dramatic path and instead only saunters along.
Could stirring drama have been wrought from the material without falsifying the actual events? I believe the solution might have been found in Keats's letters, not by deploying quotes (as Campion clumsily does in the opening scenes), but by tapping into the rage Keats felt at the early dying of his light. His irrational outbursts of jealousy and resentment against Fanny, who he knew would outlive him (which she did by almost sixty years), her bewilderment at his outbursts, and his conscientious attempts to overcome his own unfairness—these emotions might have brought a surge to the later scenes. (Anthony Burgess accomplishes something like this in his novella about Keats's final days, Abba Abba.)
And this brings us back full circle to what seems to be a chronic Campion tendency. Long ago Norman Mailer insisted that William Styron could not create a man who could “stand on his feet.” He was being unfair to his competitor and ex-friend, but the general point is valid. Any storytelling artist must be able to create a character that is more than a whimsy of the author and more than a victim of circumstance. Campion's characters tend to be notional. Casting Ben Whishaw as Keats insured that she has somebody on the screen who fulfills the popular image of a romantic poet. But, except for one stirring moment of jealousy near the beginning of the movie, Whishaw never gets a chance to display the temperament or—what's on display in the letters—the profound intellect of the poet. On screen he pines, he smiles, he suffers for love, and even recites a couple of his poems, though vapidly. But where is the man who could come up with the observation that a quarrel in the street may be repellant but the energy fuelling it is admirable? The John Keats Campion has put on the screen is a man who cannot stand on his feet.
