Jane Campion (2009)

I know it’s wrong to prejudge a picture by its trailer but I can’t think of many recent ones which have travestied the film, and misrepresented the filmmaker’s intentions, quite as grossly as the Bright Star trailer did.  Considering how few weak spots there are in the whole two hours of screen time, it was quite a feat to put together two minutes that made the picture (‘based on a true story’) look naff. Some people feel relatively safe watching costume drama – the pastness of the setting seems to offer a kind of protection, to ensure that the range and depth of feelings conveyed and excited by the piece are somehow contained and distanced.  Jane Campion is determined to cut through these limiting tendencies in Bright Star, the story of the tragic love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne (literally the girl next door – in Hampstead).  With formidable discipline and concentration, on her own part and on the part of her cast, Campion more than succeeds.  And the tightness of her focus – there are virtually no sub-plots – helps to get across the increasingly obsessive nature of the love story.  The film is gripping from the word go.  It begins with close-ups of needlework (Fanny is a skilled and imaginative seamstress).  At some points in this sequence it’s hard to tell whether the needle is pulling through recalcitrant material or human skin – either way, it looks to be tough, possibly painful going.

Campion has decided that the best way to make the film emotionally dynamic and immediate is to make the people in Bright Star seem modern in how they express themselves, how they seem to think.  It takes a few minutes to adjust to this and it could be argued that the characterisations are – technically – anachronistic.  But I found myself accepting them very quickly:  the immediacy is bracing and it’s a welcome change to hear actors who are impersonating people from two centuries ago and whose readings don’t seem to put their lines in quotation marks.  Campion’s modernising approach here is almost the reverse of productions of Shakespeare that feel the need to make the play ‘relevant’ by updating its setting or by having the humorous elements played in a broadly comical style that delivers laughs, crudely earned, so as to reassure the audience they can get Shakespeare without needing to pay too much attention to the language or the story or the themes.  Campion’s purpose is rather, by helping us feel fully engaged with the characters, to give them greater depth and complexity.  The 1820s production design and costumes, both by Janet Patterson, are entirely convincing and the writing is free of jarring modernisms but the people inhabiting the sets, wearing the clothes and speaking Campion’s dialogue seem verbally and psychologically our contemporaries.  (Back in 1996, Douglas McGrath did something essentially similar – and similarly successful – with his streamlined adaptation of Emma, and the fresh, well-orchestrated performances he got from a fine cast.)   

Films about famous writers are inherently difficult to bring off:  the protagonist can’t sing a song or play an instrument or even work on a painting in a way that conveys their specialness and that works on screen.  But playwrights are perhaps a better bet than poets – at least we can watch other people performing what they wrote.  (Novelists, though, may be even more of a challenge:  showing what makes one tick sometimes fails to get beyond clouds of cigarette smoke, sheets of paper ripped from the typewriter and hurled into the bin).  Bright Star isn’t a biopic of Keats – Fanny Brawne is the central character – but Jane Campion in any case manages to transcend the usual problems of dramatising a writer’s talent.  She was inspired by Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats, as well as by the poems themselves, which seem to have convinced her of the passionate nature of the love between Keats and Fanny and which Campion uses sparingly and, in most cases, intelligently to express the relationship.  When Keats comes to spend Christmas with the Brawnes and is urged to read an after dinner poem, he recites a few lines then dries and apologises.  The moment is both tantalising (we hear so little before he blanks) and affecting (the poetry reminds him of his growing feelings for Fanny and they get in the way of the words).  I was less convinced by Fanny’s reprise of the ‘Last Sonnet’ (‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art!’) as she walks through Hampstead woodland after Keats’s death (the film’s final scene).  It seems too conventional – the poem is being used merely to give dramatic substance to Fanny’s grief.  Campion then has Ben Whishaw read ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in its entirety, over the closing credits.  This is slightly distracting – should you ignore the credits in order to concentrate on the poem? – but it’s a good way of keeping (most of) the audience in their seats.

Occasionally a scene ends abruptly, with Campion not seeming sure where to take it (although that in itself is quite powerful when the director is otherwise so much in control of what she’s doing).  There’s a risk too that because the overall approach is so distinctive you’ll be disappointed by passages that seem staple ingredients of a period piece about a doomed love but Campion always seems to manage to take the scene in a direction that restores excitement.  A good example of this occurs when Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown is reading the letter received from Italy that tells of the poet’s death and is interrupted by Fanny’s crying out that she can’t stand to hear more.  But then the camera follows her out of the room to the passageway and Abbie Cornish’s rendering of Fanny’s grief is so startling and distressing that she quickly erases the clichéd stop-I-can’t bear-it moment.  She cries for Keats, then for her mother; when Mrs Brawne comes to her, Fanny can’t breathe and panics.  We can’t tell whether she’s scared at losing her breath or at the prospect of letting her feelings out instead of gulping them down.  It’s as if she’s terrified of really starting to express her loss because she might then never be able to stop.

Abbie Cornish dominates the screen with the minimum of histrionics.  She leaves you in no doubt that Fanny Brawne is not just in the grip of an obsession but determined to continue in it, however painful it may be.  I’ve not seen Ben Whishaw before, except in his small role in the generally unmemorable I’m Not There.  It’s hard to tell from Bright Star how versatile he’ll prove to be – how strong a presence he can be in roles that demand one – but he’s certainly well cast here, where his effects are perfectly scaled to the piece.  He gives Keats a charming hesitancy in company, which makes the rare socially demonstrative moments all the more effective.  There’s just one point where Whishaw’s emotional modesty feels wrong.  Keats angrily tells Brown about the kitchen maid Abigail’s pregnancy and says that the two of them should find the villain who did the deed and give him what for.  When Brown admits the child is his, Keats’s shift from high dudgeon into puzzled acceptance is too unobtrusive.  Whishaw reads the poems extraordinarily well:  the phrase ‘makes them his own’ seems genuinely apt here.  The poems sound both newly created and deeply, personally understood.  Abbie Cornish isn’t quite so good at the verse reading – she tends to dramatise the lines more obviously than Whishaw – but perhaps this makes sense, and complements what he does.  At the start of the relationship Fanny doesn’t have much of a feel for poetry:  Cornish convincingly suggests that Fanny comes to love it because she loves the man it’s written by.  In any case, the connection between the two leads is so strong that it generates a very effective reading of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (in which they speak alternate lines).  Cornish and Whishaw are very good at letting us see a private intimacy between Fanny and Keats even when the scene itself isn’t explicitly intimate and there are other members of the household around.   And Campion structures the growth of their passion with great skill:  instead of obvious, decisive progressions, you suddenly realise a new closeness between the couple that wasn’t present before but which already feels strongly established.  Although Keats and Fanny become engaged, the fact that the relationship is never consummated gives it an unusual and sustained pressure.

Jane Campion succeeds in dramatising not just a powerful love story but a gripping hate story too.   The tension in the exchanges between Fanny and Brown, Keats’s deeply possessive mentor, is electrically unpleasant:  we sense her learning from Brown how to use words as weapons; once Fanny has developed sarcastic skills, we watch him increasingly on the defensive – using words as armour instead.   The casting of Paul Schneider as Brown is intriguing, not least because Campion has made him very Scottish indeed (including tartan waistcoats and trousers)[1].  Schneider does more than handle the accent well:  he turns it into part of Brown’s increasingly desperate extraversion.  At one point, I began to think the script was making Brown – as the love between Keats and Fanny grows, and he feels himself relegated – the simple villain of the piece; but you come to believe that Brown’s misdeeds, especially his seduction of Abigail, are motivated by a more complex jealousy and love for his protégé, and feelings of redundancy now that Keats is preoccupied with Fanny.   When a different member of the literary circle to which they belong accompanies Keats on his trip to Italy (it’s hoped the climate there will prolong Keats’s life), Fanny accuses Brown of disloyalty.  In response he repeats bitterly and increasingly overemphatically, ‘I have failed John Keats!’  Schneider brings off this difficult, self-lacerating scene very well (it resonates with an early sequence in which Brown, irritated by Fanny’s interruption of one of his and Keats’s writing sessions, reacts to her calling him an ‘ape’ by pretending noisily to be one).  The antipathy between Fanny and Brown is enduring.  Even when, in great personal anguish, he tells her of Keats’s death, Brown seems to derive some consolation from the hurt it will cause Fanny.    The film’s emotional unsparingness is perhaps even more remarkable in the Fanny-Brown relationship than the Fanny-Keats one.

The physical settings, in the hands of Campion, Janet Patterson and the cinematographer Greig Fraser, are seldom simply pretty.  Outdoors and indoors there are lovely things to see but sometimes the power of the image derives from the sense of vulnerability or transience of what’s beautiful in it:  white laundry flapping in the wind in the middle of a deserted landscape; the Brawnes’ hearth at Christmas, with the family cat (who has a great purr) on Fanny’s lap.  As well as the fine houses and spaciousness of Hampstead, there’s also mud; as well as Hampstead, there are the dirty, narrow alleys of Kentish Town, where Keats takes lodgings at one point.  During one of several periods of separation, Keats, in a letter to Fanny, tells her that he would rather have a life of three days with her than one of fifty years without her; he likens the brief intensity of this love to the ephemeral existence of a butterfly.  Fanny writes back to tell him that she’s started a butterfly garden.  In the marvellous sequence that follows, Fanny and her younger siblings catch butterflies and their mother finds them sequestered in a room full of the things.  To Mrs Brawne, the fluttering in the confined space is rather irritating; to the cat, on his hind legs at the window seat, they might be good sport; to Fanny, her brother and sister, the variously, vividly coloured creatures are, in different ways, magical.  A moment later, we see the remains of some butterflies swept into a dustpan.

It would be hard to fault any of the actors in this film.  Antonia Campbell Hughes (Abigail) and the other members of the Keats-Browne circle – including Jonathan Aris (as Leigh Hunt), Samuel Barnett and Samuel Roukin – all do well. Kerry Fox, in a truly delicate performance, fuses Mrs Brawne’s love for her daughter and wanting to see her happy with a deep anxiety to protect Fanny from what her heart desires.  Fanny’s young brother and sister are very well played by Thomas Sangster and Edie Martin respectively:  they have charm (especially the little girl) but we can also see the two children taking in and becoming older through what’s happening around them.

17 November 2009

[1] The (short) Wikipedia article on Brown has him born in Lambeth and no indication that he was raised in Scotland.  However, Paul Schneider, in a YouTube interview about the role, confirms that Brown was Scottish.