Bright Star | |
---|---|
Directed by | Jane Campion |
Written by | Jane Campion |
Produced by | Jan Chapman Caroline Hewitt |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Greig Fraser |
Edited by | Alexandre de Franceschi |
Music by | Mark Bradshaw |
Production companies | BBC Films Screen Australia UK Film Council New South Wales Film and Television Office Hopscotch International Pathé |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. Entertainment UK (United Kingdom; theatrical) 20th Century Fox (United Kingdom; home media) Pathé Distribution (France) [1] Hopscotch Films (Australia) [2] |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 119 minutes |
Countries | United Kingdom Australia France |
Languages | English French |
Budget | $8.5 million |
Box office | $14.4 million [3] |
Bright Star is a 2009 biographical romantic drama film, written and directed by Jane Campion. It is based on the last three years of the life of poet John Keats (played by Ben Whishaw) and his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Campion's screenplay was inspired by a 1997 biography of Keats by Andrew Motion, who served as a script consultant.
Bright Star was in the main competition at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and was first shown to the public on 15 May 2009. The film's title is a reference to a sonnet by Keats titled "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art", which he wrote while he was with Brawne.
In 1818 Hampstead, the fashionable Fanny Brawne is introduced to poet John Keats through the Dilke family. The Dilkes occupy one half of a double house, with Charles Brown occupying the other half. Brown is Keats' friend, housemate, and associate in writing.
Fanny's flirtatious personality contrasts with Keats' notably more aloof nature. She begins to pursue him after her siblings Samuel and Toots obtain his book of poetry, "Endymion". Her efforts to interact with the poet are fruitless until he witnesses her grief for the loss of his brother, Tom. Keats begins to open up to her advances while spending Christmas with the Brawne family. He begins giving her poetry lessons, and it becomes apparent that their attraction is mutual. Fanny is nevertheless troubled by his reluctance to pursue her, as to which her mother surmises, "Mr. Keats knows he cannot like you, he has no living and no income."
It is only after Fanny receives a valentine card from Brown that Keats passionately confronts them and asks if they are lovers. Brown sent the valentine in jest, but warns Keats that Fanny is a mere flirt playing a game. Fanny is hurt by Brown's accusations and Keats' lack of faith in her; she ends their lessons and leaves. The Dilkes move to Westminster in the spring, leaving the Brawne family their half of the house and six months rent. Fanny and Keats then resume their interaction and fall deeply in love. The relationship comes to an abrupt end when Brown departs with Keats for his summer holiday, where Keats may earn some money. Fanny is heartbroken, though she is comforted by Keats' love letters. When the men return in the autumn, Fanny's mother voices her concern that Fanny's attachment to the poet will hinder her from being courted by a more obviously eligible suitor. Fanny and Keats secretly become engaged.
Keats contracts tuberculosis the following winter. He spends several weeks recovering until spring. His friends collect funds so that he may spend the following winter in Italy, where the climate is warmer. After Brown impregnates a maid and is unable to accompany him, Keats finds accommodation in London for the summer, and is later taken in by the Brawne family following an attack of his illness. When his book sells with moderate success, Fanny's mother gives him her blessing to marry Fanny once he returns from Italy. The night before he leaves, he and Fanny say their tearful goodbyes in privacy. Keats dies in Italy the following February of complications from his illness, as his brother Tom did.
In the last moments of the film, Fanny cuts her hair in an act of mourning, dons black attire, and walks the snowy paths that Keats had walked many times. It is there that she recites the love sonnet that he had written for her, called "Bright Star", as she grieves the death of her lover.
In addition to "Bright Star" several other poems are recited in the film, including "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Ode to a Nightingale". Both Campion and Whishaw completed extensive research in preparation for the film. Many of the lines in the script are taken directly from Keats' letters. [4] Whishaw, as well, learned how to write with a quill and ink during filming. The letters that Fanny Brawne receives from Keats in the film were actually written by Whishaw in his own hand.
Janet Patterson, who has worked with Campion for over 20 years, served as both costume designer and production designer for the film. [5]
The Hyde House and Estate in Hyde, Bedfordshire, substituted for the Keats House in Hampstead. Campion decided that the Keats House (also known as Wentworth Place) was too small and "a little bit fusty". [6] Some filming also took place at Elstree Studios. [7]
Composer Mark Bradshaw can be seen in the film as the conductor while the male choir performs the track Human Orchestra, which Bradshaw arranged from the third movement of the serenade for twelve winds and string bass by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. [8]
The film garnered positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 83% out of 175 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average score of 7.26/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Jane Campion's direction is as refined as her screenplay, and she gets the most out of her cast – especially Abbie Cornish – in this understated period drama." [9] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". [10]
Mary Colbert of SBS awarded the film five stars out of five. "If Campion intended to inspire an appreciation and rediscovery of Keats' poetry," she writes, "she has not only succeeded but herself created an artistic monument to his life, love, poetry and soul." Craig Mathieson stated in the same review that Bright Star is Jane Campion's "best work since The Piano, her epochal 1993 masterpiece." [11] Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four. [12]
Poet and scholar Stanley Plumly, the author of Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, wrote of the film's writing and direction: "Jane Campion has understood the richly figurative in Keats' life without sacrificing the literal wealth of its texture. She has evoked the mystery of his genius without giving up the reality of its dailiness." [13] In 2019, The Guardian added the film in its 100 best films of the 21st century list. [14] In 2019, the BBC polled 368 film experts from 84 countries to name the 100 greatest films directed by women; Bright Star was voted at No. 54. [15]
Bright Star grossed $3,110,560 at the box office in Australia [16] for a worldwide total of $14.4m. [3]
Award | Category | Subject | Result |
---|---|---|---|
AACTA Awards (2010 AFI Awards) [17] | AFI Members' Choice Award | Jan Chapman & Caroline Hewitt | Nominated |
Best Film | Nominated | ||
Best Direction | Jane Campion | Nominated | |
Best Original Screenplay | Nominated | ||
Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Nominated | |
Best Supporting Actress | Kerry Fox | Nominated | |
Best Cinematography | Greig Fraser | Won | |
Best Editing | Alexandre de Franceschi | Nominated | |
Best Original Music Score | Mark Bradshaw | Nominated | |
Best Production Design | Janet Patterson | Won | |
Best Costume Design | Won | ||
Academy Awards [18] | Best Costume Design | Nominated | |
Alliance of Women Film Journalists Awards [19] | EDA Award for Most Beautiful Film | Won | |
EDA Award for Best Supporting Actor | Paul Schneider | Nominated | |
EDA Female Focus Award – Women's Image Award | Jane Campion | Nominated | |
EDA Female Focus Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Film Industry | Nominated | ||
EDA Female Focus Award for Best Woman Director | Nominated | ||
EDA Female Focus Award for Best Woman Screenwriter | Won | ||
ACS Awards [20] | Cinematographer of the Year | Greig Fraser | Won |
ASE Awards | Best Editing in a Feature Film | Alexandre de Franceschi | Nominated |
BAFTA Awards [21] | Best Costume Design | Janet Patterson | Nominated |
British Independent Film Awards [22] | Best Director | Jane Campion | Nominated |
Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Nominated | |
Best Supporting Actress | Kerry Fox | Nominated | |
Best Technical Achievement | Greig Fraser (For cinematography) | Won | |
Cannes Film Festival [23] | Palme d'Or | Jane Campion | Nominated |
César Awards [24] | Best Foreign Film | Nominated | |
Chicago Film Critics Association Awards [25] | Best Cinematography | Greig Fraser | Nominated |
Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Nominated | |
Chlotrudis Awards [26] | Nominated | ||
CinEuphoria Awards | Best Actress – International Competition | Won | |
Best Costume Design – International Competition | Janet Patterson | Won | |
Top Ten of the Year – International Competition | Jane Campion | Won | |
Critics' Choice Movie Awards [27] | Best Costume Design | Janet Patterson | Nominated |
Denver Film Critics Society Awards | Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Nominated |
Evening Standard British Film Awards | Best Film | Jane Campion | Nominated |
Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association | Dorian Award for Film of the Year | Nominated | |
Heartland Film Festival | Truly Moving Sound Award | Jane Campion | Won |
Houston Film Critics Society Awards [28] | Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Nominated |
Inside Film Awards | Best Cinematography | Greig Fraser | Nominated |
Best Editing | Alexandre de Franceschi | Nominated | |
Best Sound | Craig Butters | Nominated | |
John Dennison | Nominated | ||
Tony Vaccher | Nominated | ||
Best Production Design | Janet Patterson | Won | |
International Cinephile Society Awards | Best Picture | Nominated | |
Best Cinematography | Greig Fraser | Nominated | |
Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | 2nd Place | |
IMOA Awards | Nominated | ||
London Film Critics' Circle Awards [29] | Best British Film of the Year | Nominated | |
Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Nominated | |
National Society of Film Critics Awards [30] | 3rd Place | ||
Best Supporting Actor | Paul Schneider | Won [lower-alpha 1] | |
Online Film & Television Association Awards [31] | Best Costume Design | Janet Patterson | Won |
San Diego Film Critics Society Awards [32] | Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | 2nd Place |
Best Supporting Actor | Paul Schneider | Nominated | |
Satellite Awards [33] | Best Film | Nominated | |
Best Director | Jane Campion | Nominated | |
Best Original Screenplay | Nominated | ||
Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Nominated | |
Village Voice Film Poll [34] | Best Supporting Actor | Paul Schneider | Nominated |
Women Film Critics Circle Awards [35] | Best Actress | Abbie Cornish | Won |
Best Movie by a Woman | Jane Campion | Nominated | |
Lakeshore Records released the soundtrack for Bright Star digitally (iTunes and Amazon Digital) on 15 September 2009 and in stores on 13 October 2009. The film's soundtrack features original music by Mark Bradshaw with dialogue from the film voiced by Cornish and Whishaw. [36] [37]
A collection of Keats's love letters and selected poems was published in 2009 as a companion to the motion picture, entitled Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne. The 144-page book was published by Penguin and includes an introduction written by Campion. [38]
Joseph Severn was an English portrait and subject painter and a personal friend of the English poet John Keats. He exhibited portraits, Italian genre, literary and biblical subjects, and a selection of his paintings can today be found in some of the most important museums in London, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain.
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces".
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad produced by the English poet John Keats in 1819. The title was derived from the title of a 15th-century poem by Alain Chartier called La Belle Dame sans Mercy.
Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion is a New Zealand filmmaker. She is best known for writing and directing the critically acclaimed films The Piano (1993) and The Power of the Dog (2021), for which she has received two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DNZM) in the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film.
Thomas Brodie-Sangster is an English actor. As a child actor, he gained recognition for his roles in the commercially successful films Love Actually (2003) and Nanny McPhee (2005). He voiced Ferb in the first four seasons of Phineas and Ferb (2007–2015), and subsequently gained wider attention with his roles as Jake Murray in Accused (2010–2012), Jojen Reed in Game of Thrones (2013–2014) and Newt in the Maze Runner trilogy (2014–2018). Continued acclaim ensued with the independent films Nowhere Boy (2009), in which he portrayed Paul McCartney, Bright Star (2009), and Death of a Superhero (2011).
Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789–1864) was an English liberal critic and writer on literature.
Charles Brown was a New Zealand politician from the Taranaki area.
"Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art" is a love sonnet by John Keats.
Hyperion is a 1989 science fiction novel by American author Dan Simmons. The first book of his Hyperion Cantos series, it won the Hugo Award for best novel.
Benjamin John Whishaw is an English actor. After winning a British Independent Film Award for his performance in My Brother Tom (2001), he was nominated for an Olivier Award for his portrayal of the title role in a 2004 production of Hamlet. This was followed by television roles in Nathan Barley (2005), Criminal Justice (2008) and The Hour (2011–12) and film roles in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), I'm Not There (2007), Brideshead Revisited (2008), and Bright Star (2009). For Criminal Justice, Whishaw received an International Emmy Award and received his first BAFTA Award nomination.
Keats House is a writer's house museum in what was once the home of the Romantic poet John Keats. It is in Keats Grove, Hampstead, toward the edge of inner north London. Maps before about 1915 show the road with one of its earlier names, John Street; the road has also been known as Albion Grove. The building was originally a pair of semi-detached houses known as "Wentworth Place". John Keats lodged in one of them with his friend Charles Brown from December 1818 to May 1820, and then in the other half of the house with the Brawne family from August to September 1820. These were perhaps Keats's most productive years. According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was written under a plum tree in the garden.
Abbie Cornish is an Australian actress. In film, Cornish is known for her roles as Heidi in Somersault (2004), Fanny Brawne in Bright Star (2009), Sweet Pea in Sucker Punch (2011), Lindy in Limitless (2011), Clara Murphy in RoboCop (2014), and Sarah in Geostorm (2017). She worked with writer/director Martin McDonagh in Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). For the latter, Cornish won her first Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast. In 2018, she portrayed Cathy Mueller in the first season of Amazon Video series Jack Ryan opposite John Krasinski, a role she reprised in the fourth and final season in 2023. She also played Dixy in the film The Virtuoso (2021) alongside Anthony Hopkins.
Charles Armitage Brown was a close friend of the poet John Keats, as well as a friend of artist Joseph Severn, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Walter Savage Landor and Edward John Trelawny. He was the father of Charles (Carlino) Brown, a pioneer and politician of New Plymouth, New Zealand.
Samuel Roukin is an English actor and DJ. He is best known for his role as John Graves Simcoe in the series, Turn: Washington's Spies and Simon "Ghost" Riley in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III.
Frances "Fanny" Brawne Lindon is best known as the fiancée and muse to English Romantic poet John Keats. As Fanny Brawne, she met Keats, who was her neighbour in Hampstead, at the beginning of his brief period of intense creative activity in 1818. Although his first written impressions of Brawne were quite critical, his imagination seems to have turned her into the goddess-figure he needed to worship, as expressed in Endymion, and scholars have acknowledged her as his muse.
George Keats was an American businessman and civic leader in Louisville, Kentucky, as it emerged from a frontier entrepôt into a mercantile centre of the old northwest. He was also the younger brother of the Romantic poet John Keats.
Mark Bradshaw is an Australian composer known for his work in film and television.
Joanna Leah Richardson was an English writer, translator and journalist. She wrote 21 biographies of literary writers and poets and was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie in 1989. Richardson also contributed to various newspapers and magazines.
Dorothy Hewlett was an English scholar specialising in 19th century literature, a novelist and playwright. Known for her stewardship of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, she was a winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (1938) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.