Dancing to the end of love: Bright Star

The opening credits hover over a close-up of needle going through fabric. The image speaks to the diligence and nimbleness needed to craft clothes, poetry or prolonged, unconsummated desire. It also lets us know that Bright Star will diligently hunker down for the worm’s-eye view should it yield another sharpened physical detail for writer/director Jane Campion to weave into this tapestry-like romance, something best surrendered to as with a current. Just lie on your back and watch the patterns unfold.

John Keats died young, and if his poetry went woefully underappreciated during his life at least it was redeemed by the not easily earned devotion of its muse. Bright Star, though inspired by Andrew Motion’s Keats biography, isn’t about Keats. It doesn’t burn much celluloid trying to turn writerly brooding or hand-numbing penmanship into cinema. Its protagonist is instead young middleclass seamstress Fanny Brawne, the first girl in all of Hamstead Heath to have a triangular pleated mushroom collar. When she first meets Keats—the year is 1818—she challenges the reverence aimed at the poet’s vocation, championing handsome, useful, innovative and well-made clothing over delicate words of limited practical power. The antagonism between Fanny (Abbie Cornish) and Keats (Ben Whishaw) is kept honest through the ubiquity of Keats sidekick Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a Scottish poet as big, burly and gruff as Keats was elfin, diminutive and soft-spoken. Their intriguingly un-straightforward triangle is just one of many forces working against the fulfillment of Fanny and Keats, another being Keats’ poverty. But as imagined here, theirs was a love emboldened by ceaseless tension. The film’s vivacity is the product of a harmonious collaboration between sensitive camerawork, production design, scoring and actors, at least one of whom giving the first outstanding work of what promises to be an outstanding career.

Cornish’s performance is of the sort where you can’t decide whether it’s a case of a role being perfectly cast or whether the actor’s invested the role so generously with some secret culled from within that she’s made alternate interpretations unthinkable. That confusion of unfamiliar and overwhelming emotions that clutches youth can be read in Cornish’s face and distracted hands especially. Imperious and anxious, she has the sort of face that when directed at you makes you uncertain if her gaze is one of derision or desire. What isn’t ambiguous is that you have her complete attention. Complimenting Cornish, Whishaw picks up where his Dylan-via-Rimbuad in I’m Not There left off, every smile teasing, every adoring glance half-misted over with the young poet’s inclination to admire Beauty in general as to recognize it in the specifics of his lover’s person. It works very well, while Schneider seems to growing into himself as an actor more and more—he’s more suited to this sort of bullying and jealous dreamer than he was to the agonized young lover in All the Real Girls.

So our stars are exceptional in their roles as young lovers, leaving us with the more difficult question of whether or not this sort of young love translates into exceptional movies, a question Bright Star doesn’t easily resolve. It seems perfectly unconcerned with the proscribed meter of classical storytellng, but the rhythm it adopts instead is almost unintentionally lulling, swerving from bliss to ennui, going up and down with young love’s customary tumult. The film possesses no shortage of moments sublime or nearly so, but these moments don’t add up to a great deal of momentum. So be it. Swooning heights of beauty and feeling trump structural rigour, and that’s fine by me.

What Campion excels at here is fidelity to the subjective experience of her characters, which requires both the acknowledgement of societal limitations—such as the presumptions made by Brown and others that young women are poorly fit to comprehend poetry—and a way of evoking sensuality that embraces the transcendental. In dealing with the latter challenge, Bright Star seems to share a certain kinship with the films of Terrence Malick, The New World most especially, not only because of its star-crossed period romance but because of its grounding in the celebration of nature found in poetry. Chalk it up to mimetic license: a poetic movie about poetry, and one teeming with loveliness.

The kids are all right, the adults more problematic: a brief history of the singular films of David Gordon Green on the eve of his multiplex breakout

If the industry conditions that were once sufficiently malleable for visionary American independents to thrive have all but vanished, does that make David Gordon Green our last hope? Having released five features in the last eight years, the skinny kid from Little Rock has proven more productive than Wes Anderson—who has stars, scope, narrative cohesion, pop sensibility and, well, Disney, on his side—and is now inching up on Richard Linklater, who’s benefited from a one-for-me, one-for-them strategy with regards to balancing a slate of personal and more overtly commercially viable projects. And it now seems that Green might be tearing a page from Linklater’s book, with Pineapple Express, the latest from the house of Superbad mastermind Judd Apatow, storming into theatres next week to compete with the final rounds of big summer movie.

The question looming over Pineapple Express is whether or not Green’s distinctive—oft-labeled “regional”—sensibility, with its insistent innocence and pronounced idiosyncrasies, can be reconciled with what promises to be a rousing “stoner action comedy.” It’s a sensibility that announces itself even in Green’s student films, especially the instantly endearing ‘Physical Pinball’ (1998), in which Penelope (Candace Evanofski) looks to her widower father (Eddie Rouse) for guidance after getting her first period. With its abundant tenderness, sense of place, attention to atmosphere and playful use of Southern jive vernacular, the film feels like some miraculously inspired ABC Afterschool Special directed by Charles Burnett, with Evanofski and Rouse—with those bruised, Benicio Del Toro eyes of his—feeling so utterly authentic its as though they simply rose up from the rural North Carolina earth like a heat shimmer.

When we next see them, in Green’s feature debut George Washington (2000), that sense of milieu, of the organic merging of people, landscape and industry, expands, unfurls and breathes deep. It’s both meditative and serene and rippling with funky humour and warmth, drifting through its multiracial community of kids and adults who work and play, more or less harmoniously, within the intermingling scrap yards, fecund woods and train tracks. Evanofski’s Nasia spends the first scene breaking up with Buddy (Curtis Cotton) because he’s too immature. She’s 13, he’s 12. “Did you think we were going to be together forever?” she asks. “Can I kiss you one last time?” Buddy counters, his plea dangling so fragile in the night air between them. Green envelops the scene with stillness, treats it without the slightest hint of condescension to the transitory emotions of pubescence. Rouse’s Damascus is likewise immensely present before Green’s camera, even while giving a trembling monologue worthy of an inaugural AA meeting about getting humped by a dog.

The peak sounds of labour echo, while a watery piano refrain permeates. A glimpsed journal reads “We are all friends.” A kid in a lizard mask delivers a soliloquy to an auditorium reclaimed by weeds. People ride motorbikes, eat lunch, and hug. One child rescues another from drowning and becomes a traffic-directing superhero. A man and a boy stand around discussing the boy’s sick mom and the colour of healthy pee, and crucially, the camera, as coaxed by Green and his marvelous cinematographer Tim Orr, never breaks away or gets in tight, just holds back in a wide shot, letting the scene play out through body language. This is still one of my favourite movies of our young century.

Though still gorgeous, charming, even startlingly sweet, All the Real Girls (03), Green’s love story, begins to reveal limitations. The kids have grown into adults—strangely, none are black now. An air of youth growing up and going nowhere blankets the landscape as palpably as Green and Orr’s permanent magic hour, which kisses everything with honey, rust and autumnal glow. The particular sadness of this world is best embodied in Tip (Shea Wingham), whose nickname likely stems from his pompadour, a vestige of classical teen rebellion, while he sports that most telltale accoutrement of resignation and despair: the fannypack.

The story focuses on local pussyhound Paul (co-writer Paul Schneider) and Tip’s little sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel), back from private school and a sort of beguiling alien in this place with her orbular eyes and lack of accent. Their romance is meant to give us some sweep, yet somehow the film feels more alive when listening in on some pretty brilliant diner conversation or hinting at the Oedipal overtones of Paul’s relationship with his single mom (Patricia Clarkson). The scene where Paul and Noel’s initial bliss is broken by a confession of infidelity does indeed achieve moments of genuine, aching emotional truth, but its route to truth feels too much like drama class improv, with Schneider really acting hard, while, combined with Deschanel’s inarticulate commitment anxiety (homework for The Happening, it turns out), the ever-hushed musical score is so soothingly beautiful that it takes a bite of the urgency, keeping the collective pulse at an al-too reasonable level. I could probably re-watch All the Real Girls over and over again, but I can’t say it isn’t overlong.

Undertow (04) was a first stab at something more marketable, or at least studio financing-friendly, while reacquainting Green with the actors who undoubtedly make his best collaborators: kids. As a fast-paced thriller, this “Deliverance, with kids”—Green’s description—is unsurprisingly wobbly, with its deranged, greedy uncle on the heels of runaway nephews motor never quite reaching full throttle. But as an homage to Night of the Hunter and an opportunity to soak up more Southern reverie, like watching a tyke eat paint or the closing reunion with grandparents, its aged surprisingly well. More problematic is Snow Angels (07), a tale of divorced parents (Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale) that has yet to hit many theatres outside of the major centres. It starts wonderfully, with a marching band playing ‘Sledgehammer’ and more hints of awkward young love, before sinking into a sort of hysterical murk as the story—from Stuart O’Nan’s novel—settles into the deep, way-deep darkness and loss that lies at its heart.

Being a comedy populated with capable comic talents—Seth Rogen, James Franco—it seems perfectly likely that Pineapple Express may be just the bridge the still very green Green, now all of 33, needs to imbue his adult characters with the same nuance he’s brought to kids. What is surely a well-structured script should also offer Green the sort of challenge he needs, one that asks him to use atmosphere as a means rather than an end. In any event, along with Green’s promised remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, there’s every reason to look forward to this marriage of outsider art and multiplex chops. God knows we need something to actually pull their increasingly divided audiences together.

The protracted, self-conscious assimilation of an established aesthetic in the realization of an extremely interesting merging of history and myth

To draw back the curtain of myth while simultaneously exploiting its allure, mining it for its commentary on what it says about our participation in myth-building: this is something a great western can do beautifully. Westerns have a special ability to be romantic and iconoclastic at once. Sam Peckinpah pulled off this particular feat at least three times, though in doing so, he seems to have helped kill off the genre for nearly everyone trying to follow his example.

Even ardent fans can probably count on their digits the number of great westerns to have appeared on the frontier since those heady 1970s. Maybe that’s why Andrew Dominik’s sophomore feature seems so intent on invoking that period in his grandiose adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford –though it would surely have benefited from a more modest approach. Dominik’s rustling prairies and half-mumbled reveries owe a debt to Terrence Malick that simply can’t be paid through these protracted misadventures into formal fidgeting and half-digested philosophy.

I figure I’m actually the target audience for The Assassination. A story about a strange kid strangely obsessed with his hero, gradually coming to a place where he eclipses him by consuming him, a story loosely told in painterly Albertan landscapes and enigmatically detailed scenes of stark, awkward violence –I generally gobble this stuff up. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s shot by Roger Deakins and scored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. (Cave even appears in the film, singing the same tune as that hapless minstrel in Sam Fuller's I Shot Jesse James, a movie that's pretty much the exact opposite of The Assassination in every way imaginable.) Yet maybe its because the film has so much going for it that it continually annoyed me so. There’s such poetry inherent in the material, such talent involved, that it should have been much better.

The film’s voice-over is risibly redundant, frequently telling us precisely what the actors are doing on screen, albeit in the purple prose of antiquated literature. Every time Dominik ended another self-consciously pretty scene with another fade to black, only to open on another very pretty scene with Vaseline around the edge of the lens and yet more voice-over, I think I actually slapped my head in wonder that someone could work so hard to kill the momentum of a picture.

Pretty too is Brad Pitt as James, a not-too present presence who sort of pops up now and then to look groomed and tormented or bully somebody around. At one point he sadistically beats a little boy and then cries afterwards. More interesting is Casey Affleck’s Ford, who at least is effortlessly convincing as a twerp. There’s a memorable, tremendously creepy moment where Ford lists all of the things he believes he has in common with James. But the film’s most appealing performance is arguably that of Paul Schneider, whose tenure with David Gordon Green has given him the chops to give a genuinely rascally reading of a line like “They say when a woman’s on fire you’re supposed to roll her around on the ground and cover her up with your body!”

There are, to be sure, certain moments and ideas in The Assassination I won’t forget for some time. The thing is, rather than making me want to go back and see the movie again, almost every one of them make me want to just read Hansen’s book.