Cuddle Porn

Watching Bright Star was like having dinner while sitting
across from a couple who are completely in love. “Wow, you guys sure
like to touch noses. Umm … waiter? Can I get some more bread? Waiter?
Hello?”

But Bright Star doesn’t start out that way, and is actually
pretty decent for the first 45 minutes or so. Unfortunately, it’s about
two hours long, so that leaves a lot of time for cutesy
nose-rubbing.

Writer/director Jane Campion is responsible for the gooey and
overrated The Piano, which is an experiment in seeing how
emphatically angry Holly Hunter can look without uttering a word. It
nonetheless cemented Campion’s reputation as the premier
historical-romance cineaste, and now, a mere 16 years later, she
returns to the 19th century to film the story of Fanny Brawne, the
woman John Keats loved in the final years of his short life.

Abbie Cornish stars as Fanny. Cornish has been pretty good in
everything she’s done, and she’s pretty good in this, but less good
than she’s been in the past. There’s something about the
historical-romance genre that calls for a mannered acting style which
doesn’t exactly suit Cornish’s normally flowing performance. It’s also
an odd role for Cornish in that she remains fully dressed throughout;
considering her previous film roles, I wonder what Campion had to offer
her to get her to keep her clothes on.

Ben Whishaw, who plays John Keats, looks like he was
computer-generated by combining equal parts Pre-Raphaelite painting and
emo-rock boy in an unholy algorithm designed to produce an actor who
could only ever play Victorian romantic heroes. He’s got the genre
style down well enough to stage his way through the performance with a
reasonable degree of fluency.

Paul Schneider, who’s probably best known to American audiences as
Mark on Parks and Recreation, is amazing as Keats’ friend
Charles Brown. He’s got an awesome 19th-century beer-gut, a Scottish
brogue that could sandblast the paint off a battleship, and a wild,
mean-spirited glare that makes him the toast of this cute-topian
fantasy.

All of which does a lot to redeem the movie. Plus, Campion wisely
avoids incidental music in the beginning of the film, neatly
establishing the silence of the Victorian drawing room. She really
captures a time before television and radio, when people had to learn
to dance and sing accompanied only by their own clapping and whatever
instruments they knew how to play.

However, about 45 minutes in, as Cornish and Whishaw dash across a
meadow (yes, they literally dash across what is, in fact, a meadow);
the violins rear up, and love makes its appearance. The thing about
love is it feels good, but, when it’s not in its sweatiest moments, it
can be a bit boring to look at.

And Whishaw and Cornish do, literally, curl up together and rub
noses. Then they hold hands and do a little hugging and light
hair-stroking, followed by some brief and forbidden lip-to-lip contact.
So this is basically cuddle porn. And there’s a reason that cuddle porn
is not a genre.

Other than the fact that it’s really boring, though, this is a
pretty good film. Campion makes some tremendously strange choices, and
they’re sort of fun to watch or wait for while you’re watching Whishaw
and Cornish express feelings through the universal language of
snuggles. Like, Campion has a young boy take out a violin, and without
showing the scene of him playing the violin, she cuts to a shot of him
putting it away. Weird!

Even better, there’s a longish sequence wherein Fanny and her
preternaturally cute little brother and sister collect butterflies, and
then create a butterfly habitat in her bedroom. Then they sit around
and think about love as butterflies land on their eyeballs. And when
Fanny starts to feel bad about her relationship with Keats, all the
butterflies die. I mean, it’s not subtle, but at least it’s visually
arresting. I should note that these appear to be real butterflies, so
I’m guessing there’s no People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
approval on this movie, but like they say in Hollywood, you can’t make
a sappy romantic period piece without killing a few Lepidoptera.

Also on the plus side, Campion’s script occasionally, and neatly,
deflates the film’s pretensions by having Fanny’s little sister,
“Toots,” come out with a zinger. For example, when Fanny is feeling
particularly down, Toots appears before her mother and says, “Fanny
would like a sharp knife.” “Why?” asks Fanny’s mother. “To kill
herself,” says the angel-faced Toots. Kids: They say the darnedest
things about romantic suicide.

Still, in spite of all these nice touches, Bright Star is not
terribly successful at maintaining interest. Keats died when he was
still quite young, so it’s hard to understand why Campion’s movie is so
long, unless she was attempting a shot-for-shot remake of his life. In
which case, it was kind of her to have edited out most of the scenes of
him sleeping.

This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2009.