Bright Star – A Review

Jane Campion says she made a movie about John Keats because she “was terrified of poetry”. A tricky poem was like a spider in a high corner of her brain; making meaning hard to reach; staining her enjoyment. But Keats proved a good teacher. As he says in the movie: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” Bright Star is about a love of verse.

An impoverished Keats is a lodger at the Brawne household in 1818. His poetry has not sold well. He shares a bachelor parlour with his friend Charles Brown and spends his days, like most writers, staring at a blank page the way a sniper watches an open window. Then one day his landlady’s daughter takes an interest in his poems. Her name is Fanny Brawne and she dresses like a rare orchid. She speaks to Keats with a directness he finds intriguing. She wants to understand his work. Since Keats lacks funds, she agrees to pay him to be her poetry tutor. She will become Keats’s muse, and the “Bright Star” of his most rapturous sonnet.

“Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art/ Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night…No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable/ Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast…” In those lines – that mixture of headiness and eroticism – Jane Campion finds her movie. The love between John Keats and Fanny Brawne is chaste, unyielding and tragic. Like Keats’s poem, it conjures a feeling like taking your last breath; that special awareness that comes with sensing mortality. There is no sex in the movie, but the physical connection between the two leads is palpable. Their every kiss is like a resuscitation. Their every touch pierces skin.

Ben Whishaw plays Keats as a bookish man with a roaring heart. There’s an intensity about him, but nothing threatening. He’s a man who could look right through you if he were reading. But he’s also present – the way people are when they have experienced death at a young age. He isn’t sentimental, or mawkish. Rather, he’s someone who has a passion in life, and who is loved because of that passion. When Jane Campion films Whishaw sitting, musing, by a tree, another actor might look fey or ridiculous. Whishaw looks real, as if he really were receiving inspiration. Even his consumptive coughing fits avoid the ominous-cough cliché.

Abbie Cornish, faced with the more difficult task of embodying a muse, goes the practical route. Fanny Brawne isn’t an inscrutable beauty, or a tantalising enigma, she’s a young woman who understands John Keats. Cornish smiles too knowingly for a waif; she smiles like a card sharp. Again, there’s no trace of sentimentality. Her feelings for Keats strike her like a hammer striking an anvil. When he dies, her tears are searing. Cornish looks at Whishaw throughout as if, when she was around him, she could see the blood moving through his body. When he’s sick, it’s as if she can see the sickness. The final meeting between the two, when Fanny begs John to take her with him to Italy, is heart-breaking because they both know it’s their final meeting. It’s mutual awareness that makes them kin.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever/ Its loveliness increases, it will never/ Pass into nothingness… What Bight Star captures is the ecstasy of love: the part that’s like a great poem. There are easier things in life than love and poetry – accepting mystery is hard – but the rewards are ample. Keats’s metaphor of “diving in a lake” is apt because it’s dangerous. If you refuse to swim for shore, you could drown. But that’s only if you give up. What Jane Campion celebrates in Bright Star is the urge to grasp intangibles: whether you’re struck by a face or a verse, if you pursue that impulse, you discover life.

An Education – A Review

You know you’ve learnt something when you’re changed by what you’ve learnt. If you’re still you, plus a memorized inventory: no dice. That’s why most of most what we learn in school is only exam fodder. There’s a big difference between knowledge that helps you get on in life and knowledge that helps you live. The new British movie, An Education, is about a valuable lesson taught to a 16-year-old by her first whopping great mistake. She is Oxford-bound, a straight-A student, so she could easily have stuck to her books and missed her opportunity. Thankfully, she studies her mistake – appreciates it – and allows experience to enhance her mind.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – A Review

Terry Gilliam has a reverence for failure. In his movie The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges talks (ruefully) of Nietzsche’s “bungled and botched…expendable masses” who “get close to greatness, but never get there.” In a Gilliam movie, the hero is always either a fool or a madman, someone who sees much but blows his chances, aims high but is often speared by the world. As screen alter-egos go, these characters are candidly self-lacerating. Alexander Pope’s aphorism “To err is human…” is like a dare to Gilliam. He needs to conceive of movies that can’t work in order to prove that they can. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a case in point.

Less Than Zero – A Review

Watching a new zombie movie recently, I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis. Put a pair of Wayfarers on any reanimated corpse and they come to resemble one of Ellis’s creations; the blank indifference to life, the remorseless appetite. For over twenty years, Ellis has been hacking away at our world, again and again writing “tan” when he means “damned” and “tried to smile” when he knows one verb cancels the other out. There are no characters in Ellis’s books, there are only bodies. Much the way a zombie looks at the world and callously notes a holocaust, so the rich kids of Less Than Zero stare indifferently at the death of their souls.

The Soloist – A Review

Contrary to what Terry Gilliam movies teach us, going mad is no fun. The only thing real madness makes you aware of is how you should prize sanity. There are no life lessons to be learned, sadly, from slipping out of your head. Real madness is a hell with no dimensions: ungraspable and unkind. There’s something especially pitiless about a disease that corrupts thought. The new movie, The Soloist, tells the true story of a schizophrenic Julliard-trained musician named Nathaniel Ayers. He is, by turns: loquacious, gentle, intriguing and capable of snapping your neck. He is not changed by the movie’s end, and the movie is better for it.

Twilight – A Review

Wuthering Heights makes more sense if you’re a teenage girl. Heathcliff is clearly hot. For starters, he’s filled with inner turmoil. He doesn’t have parents, so there’s no-one to cramp his style. His sudden violent outbursts are mostly directed at less-hot men. And he shares his name with the late Heath Ledger. It’s a crying shame there were no teenagers around when Emily Bronte wrote the book, as you could have saved critics years of wrangling over subtext. Fortunately, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was immediately understood by its readership. It’s about a Heathcliff-type named Edward, who struggles with love (and being a vampire).

Gamer – A Review

Ninety per cent of New Media makes me feel like Buck Rogers. I look at something like the Second Life phenomenon as proof I’ve fallen through a hole in time. The idea of living vicariously through a computer-generated alter-ego just seems bat-shit insane to me. Call it my Gil Gerard-reflex, but when I read about a real-life couple who met through a computer game and divorced when the husband had a virtual affair, my sense of what’s real goes a bit 25th century. Admittedly, the new action movie, Gamer, is not the ideal platform for questioning the direction of early 21st century social-norms, but the story is (at heart) a Second Life parody.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Solider is one of the few jobs that make sense to a six-year-old. If your noun can be a verb – if your job implies an action – it has kid-appeal. That’s why Army Men are popular at playtime and Accountant Men stay in their original packaging. Accountancy, like most office work, is a profession that ill-suits six-year-olds. Sitting at a desk can only engage the mind for so long. But to be in the army! Think of it the way a small person does: a) you shout; b) you shoot at stuff; c) everyone gets a gun. No wonder G.I. Joe is catnip for kids. The new movie may even reacquaint a few office drones with their inner child.

500 Days of Summer – A Review

If you’ve ever mooned over a girl, this movie’s for you. Yes, savour that paper-cut smile. You know the girl I’m talking about. You met her in your teens or your early twenties. She had a way of dressing just so. Her quirks were sonnet-worthy. She probably rode a bike, or played an obscure instrument. The chances of the relationship working were nil, but her cool only encouraged you. For you, love was all about delay. So you pratted about; writing a script for the pair of you, while she eyed up someone else. It ended. You met the right girl. And now you get to laugh fondly at yourself in 500 Days of Summer.

The Hurt Locker – A Review

Soldiers are not allowed to smoke during combat. Before and after is fine, but during is reckless. It’s like talking on the phone while driving, except you’re talking a man down from a ledge, while driving in the Le Mans Grand Prix. Most soldiers have enough on their minds not dying during combat. So the no-no governing combat-smoking only applies to a select few. I’d say you feel one of two ways about men who smoke in the midst of a gun-fight. Either: a) they offer proof of man’s ultimate de-sensitisation to violence. Or b) they’re f—ing rock stars! Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is for those who think b.