Bright Star: Mr. Keats is Behaving Very Oddly

                John Keats was ready for death.  In his Ode to a Nightengale he wrote, “Now more than ever, seems it rich to die.”  This was no Romantic fluff.  Death for Keats, was not like an expanding desert, tumbling over the years of his life in a slow dry demise.  Instead, it was like a terrible simoon.  The rapid bodily decay and sudden and consistent coughing up of arterial blood resulted in his futile, desperate escape from England to warmer climes.  “I feel the daisies growing over me,” he would write in the remaining hours of his short life.  Keats died like so many luminaries, believing himself a failure.  His epitaph read, “Here lays one whose name was writ in water.”  Today, from the flooded remains of Romantic literature, Keats endures. 
                 If the intention of Bright Star’s filmmakers was to make their Keats an enduring artist, or even moddy, impenetrable, opaque, or poetically pensive, then they have flatly failed.  This Keats appears dull, vacant, static, stressed, and impotently out of control of his own life.  This Keats, as Scott wrote of a character in his Raj Quartet, “Was the kind of person who had nothing much to say but gave the impression of thinking a lot, which is all right in a man but distasteful in a woman.”  The woman in Bright Star is Ms. Braun, a youthful moon-faced middle class houseguest of Keats’s purse and co-poet, Mr. Brown.  Ms. Braun’s time onscreen is spent overcoming her flounce and frippery so that she can become deep enough to win Mr. Keats.  She crams Homer, Milton, and Spencer into one week (or pretends to).  But the lover’s pent-up emotion through the first half of the film has all the passion of a pair of titmice.  

                Put another way, when the two finally kiss, you are moved in the same way as when a pigeon lands on a stoplight.  But if the film’s first half of furtive glimpses are unfulfilling and Ms. Braun’s curious intrusions into the poet’s lair, where Keats lies immured in a leathery den scratching silently against borrowed parchment, then the second half attempts to overcompensate—dumping in as much overdue beauty as possible.  Little poetry appears for the first half hour, just talk of poetry.  But the second half is packed with stanzas and sonnets so delayed that the end credits are narrated by __rapidly reading “Ode To a Nightengale.” 

                Fortunately, in the film’s second half you are blessed with crafty, awing natural shots—the tired ripples in a pond or the painterly scope of grey clouds sleeping above an amber wheat field.   The skillful, if schematic, planning of the film illustrates humanity’s true self, as time’s eternal captive.  The later majestic scenes pass through a slow budding spring of courtship between the lovers, a summer (absent Keats) of histrionics where Braun incubates butterflies in her room in his memory, a smiling autumnal return of Keats and a betrothal, ending in icy doom. 

                 So who is this Keats?  He’s a frowzy hipster adored by a cat.  His empty expression, helmet of hair, and skinny pants make you feel as if you’re on the F train to Williamsburg or a Decemberists concert, not a Shopshire estate.  That Keats is diffident is not so terrible, for as Brown self-seriously declares:  “Doing nothing is the musing of a poet.”  But Keats’s manner is so slight, so fixed and emotionless, that you might even forget he was on the screen if the director didn’t shoot an occasional nose hair zoom.  This Keats’s love of Nature doesn’t seem as much poetical (“a poet is never poetical”) as it does Hobbit-like.  He nestles barefoot in budding treetops, seems to have supernatural intelligence when relating to the film’s cow-eyed children, sleeps hidden among shrubbery while unwell, and when pursued, escapes to the nourishing forest like a stalked bird.  His entrance in the film is delayed, his onscreen life is as elliptical and flummoxing as his dialogue, and his predictable death comes far too soon. 

                  The close attention to the futile idiocy of money, symbolized in a quick tip to a delivery boy, and the conscious and coarse shots illustrating the poverty, neglect, and disease in benighted corners of English towns achieves both historical realism and the uneasy prints of a forced hand.  Keats was of the middle of the middle class and, recognized by his contemporaries as a poetic titan, had to rely on the kindness of others to survive.  These personal facts are developed and well placed in the texture of the film. 

If a film can sear images into the mind—frost flecked pine trees or the gravity dance of a star-shaped maple leaf—it was, in this industry of compromises, still forged for some purpose.  As Keats wrote in his Endymion, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever:/  Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness.”  But a captivating tale would be as memorable and beautiful as stunning scenery.  This movie, sadly, does not achieve both.