I’m sending a shortish essay today that I wrote some time ago about Jane Campion’s sublime Bright Star. I’m not sure why this film has been appearing so often in my thoughts this week.
If you haven’t seen it yet - or it’s been a while since you have, I hope you’ll seek it out.
My next post will be more writing-focused—my partner and I are at LAX as I prepare this, about to fly east to spend some time with his mother and siblings in north-central Michigan.
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Certain films, like beautiful, inviting houses, are places where many of us wish we could live. It’s rare that I feel this way when seeing a movie for the first time. It probably happens no more than once or twice a year, and in fairness to the filmmakers of the world, this could be due as much to my occasionally feeble powers of concentration as it is to the film itself.
I recently watched David O. Russell’s American Hustle, an entertaining film that sometimes showed flashes of his campy genius (ref. Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster), but it's probably about 25 minutes too long, and was, like Henry James' description of the novel, something of a loose, baggy monster. While watching the trailers that preceded it, a very different film came to mind, Bright Star, Jane Campion’s 2009 John Keats biopic.
Unlike American Hustle, it is one of those rare films I wished I could find a secret portal into because the characters and their lives and the countryside where they take their walks and fall in love are so vivid and immediate and touching. This seems to me to be the sorcery of great art: you’re sitting immobile before a screen or a painting or a photograph, but your brain and body are as alert and electrified as they would be if you were standing in the doorway of an unfamiliar room, all of your closest friends and family members suddenly leaping at you from behind the drapes and sofa to yell “Surprise!”
Another Jane Campion film, not as favorably reviewed as Bright Star (and very different thematically and topically) that made a lasting impression is Holy Smoke, which stars Harvey Keitel and Kate Winslet. Many of Campion’s films are sharp, offbeat, and sexy, and Holy Smoke might be her sexiest. Bright Star is more restrained but still sensual, longing more than lust the underlying emotion.
There’s such restraint in Bright Star, such a complex evocation of friendship and jealousy and repressed desire. Also, breathtakingly so, sympathy and love (the little girl who tells the ailing Keats that she loves him near the film’s end—I’d have trouble finding a more poignant scene in any film.)
Abbie Cornish is riveting but never showy as Keats’ love interest and literary sparring partner. Ben Whishaw, who played the creepy killer in Perfume (and has since appeared in many films and limited series, among them London Spy and the first incarnation of A Very British Scandal, alongside Hugh Grant) is likewise perfectly cast as Keats. His sensitivity and grace, the effacement, it seems, of the person he is when not being filmed, is seamless. Egoless? Maybe that’s more apt. Egolessness is probably the state, a hard one to achieve, that must be vital for success as an actor.
I don’t think we leave the theater or turn off the computer or television after seeing something as good as Bright Star with the same collection of doubts, rivalries, memories, and fears that we had when we began watching it. We are less fearful maybe, less doubtful, but more full of desire.
I know this isn’t a novel idea, but the experience of encountering something fresh and unfamiliar rewards and sustains us (even through the reading of blog posts like this one!) because a brilliant movie and the emotional and intellectual responses it produces in us feel sui generis.
Great films, a chance to commingle for a couple of hours with a mind bigger than our own minds: this strikes me as a state of beauty and grace, one that with a second viewing, can often be experienced again because a great film will not fade or founder—often the contrary—upon renewed scrutiny.
Thanks for the great post, Christine. I enjoyed very much the film you recommended a short while ago, "You hurt my feelings."