Bright Star

Jane Campion (Sweetie, The Piano, Portrait of a Lady) makes a richly evocative film-poem out of the real-life story of Fanny Brawne’s romance with John Keats in the final three years (circa 1820) of the great English poet’s brief, fervent life. Ben Whishaw, who played one of the Bob Dylans in I’m Not There, brings a nicely understated combination of turbulence and delicacy to the Keats role, and Campion deepens the character drama by giving special attention not just to the great poet’s amours, but also to the mercurial, highly charged three-way relationship between Keats, Brawne (an excellent Abbie Cornish), and the unctuously abrasive Charles Brown (a superb Paul Schneider), the poet’s friend/secretary/literary aide. Fanny’s family, the widowed Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) and her two younger siblings, have telling moments as well. What gradually emerges onscreen feels a little like a Jane Austen story filtered through the darkling moods of a Bronte novel, but whatever its influences, Bright Star consistently generates its own distinctively austere version of unsentimental romance, a quietly credible blend of modern roughness and quaint elegance. The literary pleasures extend through the final credits, during which Whishaw delivers a fine reading of “Ode to a Nightingale.” Pageant Theatre. Rated PG