Jane Campion's eye can be so very cold and muted. I think her directing can be quite clinical - as if she were pinning a butterfly into a glass case before our eyes. There is always something uncomfortable about her films. Too close for comfort is the phrase that comes to mind, and yet, sometimes it's as if the audience were one step removed.
That being said, cold and muted fit this story like a perfectly hand-stitched glove. The intensity of these characters lives fits excellently within Campion's viewpoint, and her sure mise en scene was a thrill to watch, with settings as pastoral as the best in romantic poetry. The ravishing story was moving and intimate, but not uncomfortably so. The film is filled with realistic touches - natural, yet made beautiful by the love of the two young people. The lovers palpable warmth in the cold atmosphere of their time gave me a feeling of immediacy and pity. I felt that Campion wanted to honor her emotional subject with an emotional film. It is a slow film, in the best sense, totally befitting the subject matter. I was drawn in and remained fascinated right up to the end.
Of course the sets and costumes were crazy beautiful and intricate (like the structure of a sonnet)...and very realistic for the time period portrayed. If the costumer/art director Janet Patterson doesn't win an academy award, I'll eat my hat.
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Comparing the art of stitchery to the art of poetry was lovely - lightly done. I liked how Campion gradually brought us into this more deliberate, unhurried, quieter world....a world in which two people could conceivably love one another forever without ever consummating that love, except in words. The use of white was devastating in the context of the story - a white curtain, a wall, even a hat, coming between the two, or hiding them from the rest of the world. Two lovers unable to marry, chaste in body, but bound together through verse on the whitest piece of paper. The leisurely pace gives one time to notice all the achingly beautiful things in the film, things the camera lingers over - leather bound books, a linen flounce, flowers, a wisp of hair, butterfly wings....as if Keats himself were taking notice, telling us to pay attention to the beauty around us. The conceit of memorizing and reciting poetry works here because we have been led into a world where people have the time and the quiet to do so.
What did people do before they were bombarded with overwhelming sound and imagery 100% of the time? They turned inward, As Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) does on meeting Keats....she finds she is not content pouring her considerable talents into fashion and wit, as she had been. She has only found solace in her sewing until this point. It is the only outlet allowed, and she is obsessed with it. She is thought quite silly and vain, but there is more to it. As a young woman of marriageable age, she is expected to be light and carefree, but there is a steadfast soul underneath the frivolous exterior. She is at first unable to put in the requisite thought required to study Milton or other poets picked out for her, she only has eyes for Keats. She pursues him as obsessively as she worked at her ruffles and gathers, as a conquest. He only finds her amusing. But something in Keats poetry opens her, and she becomes a seeker....Keats finds that she is bright and emotional. When she spends all night stitching a pillow cover for his dying brother, he is moved. They are brought together by death, her father's, his brother's. They fall very, very slowly in love, and are divided from each other at every turn. Her journey into the depths of love and suffering will help her to understand poetry at last, the most difficult of the arts to comprehend.
The acting was superb, although I wasn't sure where Abbie Cornish's character was coming from at first. She is so pretty that it is hard not to look at her with a jaundiced eye, which was intentional on Campion's part, I believe. Is she for real? Or is she just a vain clothes horse, sucking men dry of their inspiration? The men of her time would think she was a pretty piece of work - a viewpoint we are led to, in order for Campion to shatter that notion later on. Her character was redeemed and I give Cornish a lot of credit for the bravery it took to pull off some of her scenes at the end of the film. Her finest moment comes in the last frames of the film.
The rest of the cast were brilliant, with especial mention of Ben Whishaw as the ethereal, consumptive John Keats and the remarkable Paul Schneider as his dissolute artist friend, Mr. Brown. Whishaw was good enough that I never questioned his portrayal throughout the film, as I usually do when watching a biopic. He was weak of body but strong in spirit, just as one would want Keats to be. He and Ms. Cornish were able to show volumes with the slightest flicker of an eyelash, a turning of the head. And Mr. Schneider was incredible as Keats jealous writing partner and patron - very much in the same vein as Alan Bates. He rang change after change in his character, and at the same time represented all that was disdainful and greedy in an artist's (and a man's) nature. That he was able to make you feel so sorry for him at the end of the film is a testament to his great acting.
I have NEVER been in an audience before in which you could hear a pin drop by the end of the movie. One couple got up and left before the credits were over, but the entire rest of the audience stayed right through to the very last credit on the screen, thanks to Whishaw's voice over reading of Keat's poem, Ode to a Nightingale. One begins to realize that the act of listening is an art, too.
