by riverborn » Mon Sep 28, 2009 12:17 pm
If you like a movie of subtle moods and textures you will like Bright Star. B+ movie. I realized, as I watched it, that I was being confronted with my ideas, my internalizations of Keats, as I viewed the director's portrayal of him. Keats was fun loving, somewhat more so when he imbibed, but would he have danced an Irish jig for the Brawne family at Xmas? Would Keats have been as glib and at ease with Fanny as he was portrayed? Do we get a realistic sense of Keats depression, his mood swings, his "horrible morbibity of temperment"? I think that those of us who love Keats have internalized him so deeply, made him so much a part of our own mythic interiority, that the real Keats has probably been lost to all of us. So Campions protrayal is likely no less "accurate" than anyone elses would have been. Posthumous Keats the man is like a poem, free to be remet by each greeting spirit throughout time, an artifact to be refound by each generation. We can re-enact his tragedy, worship his poetic genius, but can we find him?
I thought that Whitshaw captured much of the Keats who tended to be social and apart at the same time. I thought that his face to be a reasonable facsimile of Keats but the body was wrong- a Shelley body so to speak. Keats was short but very broad shouldered. Probably a body type very hard to find in our modern world.
I thought the portrayal of Brown to be too overbearing. I doubt that he interfered and was up Keats rear as much as he is seen to be in the movie. I also doubt that Fanny was as smart, sensitive, and clever as she was portrayed. Keats was not comfortable around women, he likely had a few sexual encounters (one perhaps leading to his purported s.t.d. and subsequent mercury "cure"), but no relationship as such. So to assume that his genius with words, his mental, emotional, and spiritual acuity, would spill over in his choice of a first love, is probably wrong. Besides using the word minx, Keats suggests that Fanny is sort of a chatty Kathy, a fly off the handle chatterbox, who perhaps speaks before any of her thoughts have come together (in one of his less noble moments Keats also gives a written description of Fannys physical faults- perhaps a way to deflect possible criticism that Fanny was no La Belle Dame). An opinon from which I would extrapolate that this was a woman who did not live out of much depth, nor someone who would thirst for an appreciation of poetry. After Keats death Fanny did write Fanny Keats (they became friends of a sort) to express her ongoing grief, but, unlike Campions end of film notes, Fanny Brawne did not wear black for years and keep Keats forever in her heart- that is Campions fiction.
I would also suggest that Keats discomfort with women, beginning with his mother (it was said of her that she would lift her skirts to high to cross a mud puddle in order to show off her fine legs), fueled his poetry. His portrayal of the fatal woman in La Belle, the elusive moon goddess, his feminine characterizations of the nightingale, the Grecian Urn as a "bride, Moneta the admonisher, and the goddess resurrected in the the autumn fields, all suggest a man in search of the feminine whether as destroyer and as divinity. Did Keats hunger for the divine feminine in reaction to his confusion about the flesh and blood feminine?
Brawne married a sensible businessman, had a family, lived a reasonably long life, and, except for admitting to her husband and kids that she had known Keats, never let the truth out until she was near death. At that point she turned Keats love letters over to her kids who then sold them for a nice future retirement. The true Fanny lies somewhere between the images held by Keats and by Brown. I think it would be a mistake to trust Keats judgement of her in this matter. He was a man in love for the first time.
Little things: when Fanny is telling Keats how wonderful his last book of poetry is, she begins to recite La Belle Dame. this poem, of course, was never in that or any other volume of poetry. Keats wrote the nightingale ode in a little glade near Hampstead Heath. Fanny could not have seen him from the house.
All IMO of course.