bright star: half in love with easeful death

In fact, I dreamt last night that I went to see Bright Star, and today I thought what an easy dream that is to make true, so I did. Walking home afterward, a full moon, a gorgeous autumn night, there's me in my new long black coat, I felt like John Keats. It's a beauty, this film, a very simple love story. It doesn't have to reach for its obstacles (every great love story has obstacles), as they were there already, built into its very fabric, the most prosaic and concrete of difficulties: he had, as they said in those days, no fortune and no prospects, and therefore could not woo the girl. Then there was consumption, a short, troubled stay in Rome, and news of an early death.

Biopics are problematic, and biopics about the Romantics, enjoyable as they often are, are almost to a one filled with lies, albeit some of them beautiful. Julien Temple's Pandaemonium is one of the more interesting, in part because it's about Wordsworth and Coleridge instead of the usual Byron and Shelley, and because it has John Hannah and Linus Roache playing the poets. Temple helms an exquisitely visual take on the writing as well as the lives... Alas, he lies, too, like a rug he lies, most egregiously about Wordsworth's sister, who I think in life was not nearly so selfless, liberated, or intelligent as she is in Temple's version. All the other movies are about the bad Lord B and the mad Ariel, and at best they are made of rather wonderful lies instead of the pedestrian variety.

Keats is harder. Young as they sometimes went (Shelley at 29, drowned at sea, Byron at 36 of fever in Mussolonghi where he'd gone to fight for the Greeks), Keats went the fastest, fled from the world at 25, coughing up blood in Italy where funds raised from the English literary world had sent him, belatedly, as it turned out. Other than his poems, the most interesting thing in his life was his problematic, unconsummated love affair with Fanny Brawne. He and Coleridge left the most exquisite poems behind, I think, but who can compete with Byron and Shelley for sheer adventure in biography? They were rich and travelled, married and fell in love outside their marriages, chose dramatic and outlandish backdrops for their written works. Keats lived simply, poorly, travelled not at all until he was too sick to enjoy it, and did very little except to write extraordinarily well and get very bad reviews and little money in recompense.

This is one of those movies that makes you want to write, like Reds or Julia or the Whole Wide World. Sitting as the end credits rolled and the quiet voice of Ben Whishaw read selections from Keats' poems, that short, unfulfilled life seemed not at all wasted; the poems felt like the noblest way possible to spend a life.