Love on the Heath

John Keats was a Romantic poet. Note the capital “R.” The project of the Romantics, and it was a radical project, was to establish an intrinsic connection between Man and Nature–as opposed to a connection between man and God–and to oppose the elevation of reason over emotion. Keats is a character in a superficially gorgeous new movie called Bright Star, in which he is a romantic poet. Note the lower-case “r.”

No pre-Victorian radical here; rather, the Keats of Bright Star is the dream- iest non-vampire this side of Twilight, a pretty and droopy young man with exquisite manners and deep morals who wins the heart of the girl next door on Hampstead Heath. She is a bosomy and quick-tongued seamstress named Fanny Brawne, who makes bizarre outfits of her own design.

He stares at her with googly eyes which show not a glint of the limpid super-intelligence that came up with the concept of “negative capability,” according to which the greatest minds are capable of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats’s assertion that the highest form of intelligence was the ability to accept ambiguity changed the world. The Keats we see here could barely change a candle. Meanwhile, Fanny is cute and sassy and carefully stitches ruffles. It’s as if the towering genius of our age were smitten with the second runner-up on Project Runway.

The writer-director Jane Campion, universally celebrated 16 years ago for having a weird guy with Maori tattoos fondle a deaf-mute chick in 19th-century New Zealand around and about the titular The Piano, demonstrates the worst kind of cultural literacy–the kind that says, “You cannot criticize me for my pretensions or my silliness because I am so amazingly high-minded.”

Campion’s directorial method here is ridiculously schematic. In the movie’s first third, as Fanny and Keats get to know each other, the rooms in which they sit are bleak and forbidding, the skies gray. When they fall in love, suddenly the sun shines and violets bloom; Keats climbs to the top of a tree and lies upon it like Bono upon the arms of his screaming fans in a mosh pit. And when Keats takes ill and dies–slowly, slowly, although he never looks anything less than completely fabulous–the rain falls like tears from the sky. .  .  .

The oddity of the movie is that it isn’t about Keats at all, who was, obviously, a very compelling person, but about Fanny and her awakening into love with a penniless man. Campion blessed herself with the choice of the Australian actress Abbie Cornish in the role. Cornish is an uncommonly vivid and fascinating screen presence, and an amazing camera subject, at one moment stunning, at another stunningly plain. Every feeling she has is inscribed on her face and brow, and she is heart-rending as she suffers the pain of separation, both temporary and eventually permanent, from her love.

And yet what goes on in Bright Star? Keats goes away and Fanny waits for his letters. When they don’t arrive, she is sad. When they do, she reads them over and over. When he is forced to leave their block of houses, she cries out, “Why do they call this love when there is so much suffering?”

Why, indeed? The real Keats was, in fact, betrothed to a woman named Fanny Brawne, but that is probably the least interesting thing about him. He achieved before his death at 25 a degree of artistic and intellectual maturity that made him the unattaintable model, for better or worse, for would-be poets for a century or more.

The only well-crafted character in Bright Star is Keats’s sponsor Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider, an American actor speaking in a flawless Scottish accent in a revelatory performance)–portrayed here as an amusingly hedonistic reprobate who feels his own life is of secondary importance to that of his young, gifted, and very pale friend. The movie offers no way for us to understand this devotion except to make us think Brown is secretly gay. (Maybe that’s because the British actor Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, continually purses his colossal lips at Brown.) But in fact, Keats was attended by other contemporaries who understood they were in the company of someone whose work would endure forever, and who kept feeding the flame of his reputation after his death until it caught and has never yet died, as the very existence of Bright Star demonstrates.

I offer all these encomia, by the way, despite the fact that I loathe Keats’s poetry. That’s my attempt at “negative capability,” at “being in uncertainties.” How did I do?

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.