Bright Star

Gooey, pretty and content free, Bright Star is art cinema for people who, deep down, prefer Flake commercials and rococo portraits of poodles. It looks like a respectable picture; Grande Dame Jane Campion lays on the period costumes and pastorals with a trowel. It sounds like a respectable picture; a biopic charting the last years of the poet John Keats, what could be wrong with that? Unhappily, in keeping with the flimsy pretences of Coco Before Chanel, Bright Star offers the viewer a chance to walk into a cinema knowing little of the poet’s life, only to emerge two hours later knowing considerably less. Ben Whishaw, a generally capable fellow, occupies the void at the centre of the film. In the absence of historical detail or any characterisation whatsoever, his ill-defined Keats is doomed to dither and flit around the margins. The similarly flimsy plot, or what passes for one, sees the young scribe take a fancy to Miss Fanny down the road. Miss Fanny, as realised with no little flair by Abbie Cornish, is, at least, given something to do. Her love of flounces and frills is insistently equated with proto-feminist expression. No, we didn’t buy it either, but we did like Ms. Cornish who is, at last, delivering on the promise she displayed in Somersault. Our heroine’s half-hearted nemesis is John Brown, a poet whose affection for Keats is channelled into something like sexual jealousy. His interference is hardly required; when the central lovers aren’t wasting away with unfulfilled longing, they’re wasting away from love’s intensity. Oh, pull yourself together, the pair of you. For all their wistfulness, for the all superficial ‘classiness’ of the material, this picturesque, trivial confection is just as vacuous as Vin Diesel’s last five movies squared. Bright Star? White Dwarf more like.