Bright Star

I don’t know when I’ve seen a film with a more authentic period feel than Jane Campion’s take on the Romantic entanglement of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. To me everything seems just so, not just dress and décor, but the attitudes and emotions of 1820 England. Every garment looks handsewn, each sparse interior is dimly lit by fire or candlelight or daylight slanting through a window. And a tragic unconsummated romance is believably played out in glances and delicate touches of fingertips and lips, with poetry spoken as if it were at once the language of everyday life and transcendent love. The cast is uniformly up to the task, from Kerry Fox as the widowed Mrs. Brawne, Fanny’s mother and Keats’s landlady, to Paul Schneider as his roommate and fellow poet, to Ben Whishaw as the waiflike yet willful Keats, broken by disease and poverty and critical response to his work, yet exultant in his command of Romantic feeling, for nature and the lovely, lively girl next door. That girl is Abbie Cornish, Australia’s latest gift to Anglophone film (Nicole & Cate et al. – make room!). She is the Bright Star of Campion’s film as well as Keats’ poem, a strong-willed seamstress with a thirst for fashion and passion, who ignores the liabilities of the match and attaches herself to the dying poet in spite of all the world. This chaste film burns hot with feeling. (2009, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-81.)

I happened to see Ms. Cornish in another film just two nights later. In Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, she also convinces as a Texas good old girl, fiancé to one soldier returning from Iraq (Channing Tatum) and longtime friend of his buddy (Ryan Phillippe). Coming almost ten years after Pierce’s breakthrough with Boys Don’t Cry, this film was greeted as a letdown, and flopped like every other film about Iraq. Though its approach to the subject may seem formulaic and unfocused, Stop-Loss deploys a lot of energy in laying out the familiar story of boys coming home from war, with pieces of themselves left behind, so nothing hangs together anymore. The quicksilver scenes from Iraq are vivid, and as comprehensible as the reality of the situation allows. The community back home in Texas, well-cast in every particular, is sketched in as memorably as that of Friday Night Lights, though obviously without the sustained amplitude of the latter (back for a 4th season later this month!). And the outrage at the unfair treatment of returning servicemen is well taken and important, ought to be seen and absorbed. But the film has an unresolved quality that is more frustrating than open-ended, so my recommendation is equivocal. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-61.)