Bright Star

One of the benefits of coming back to Fort Collins was getting to hang out with my friends Agnes and Thor. I called Agnes a few days after I got back, and she suggested we get together for dinner. Actually it was my birthday dinner officially, and I suggested we go out to the same old local steak house that we often go to. It was great to see them again after a year, and to see Thor looking good a year after his bone marrow transplant.

We talked about politics in the car, but we switched to movies once we got in the restaurant. It's a subject we all like to talk about. In fact, it was Thor more than anyone else who is responsible for the fact that I am seeing all these movies and writing this blog.

I mentioned how even though it was October, I had no idea what movies were supposed to be the ones that were going to be the Oscar favorites. At this time last year, I could tell from the trailers, for example that Frost/Nixon, Benjamin Button, The Reader, and others were primed for Oscar contention. I have having a much harder time this year.

Agnes mentioned, to my surprise, that she thought Abbie Cornish was probably going to get an Oscar nomination for Bright Star, a movie that none of us had yet seen. Last year I loved Cornish in Stop-Loss, but Agnes suggested that because Cornish has stolen Reese Witherspoon's boyfriend, and because Witherspoon is beloved by the Hollywood community, that Cornish was on the permanent no-go list for the Academy. But now Agnes thought that Cornish was probably a good bet for a nomination. Time changes everything. Besides, it does indeed seem like a slim year.

As it happened, I got a chance to evaluate the movie and Cornish's performance a few days later when I went to see Bright Star at the Lyric Cafe Cinema in downtown Fort Collins. The Lyric is Fort Collins' local arthouse. It opened up a few years ago in an old dry cleaners on the edge of Old Town. It's sort of rustic experience in movie-going, but I missed it when I was on the road.

I was the only person in the small auditorim for the matinee showing on a weekday afternoon. I sprawled out on one of the old sofas in the front of the seats to enjoy the show.

I had high hopes for the movie, a period drama directed by Jane Campion and set in the "Jane Austen era" about a love affair between the poet John Keats and a young neighbor (Frances, played by Cornish). But after about twenty minutes, I began to feel severely let down, a feeling that stayed with me for the rest of the movie.

The thing that really struck me was how slow-moving the story is. It's been a long time since I've seen a Camion movie, so I can't remember if this is her usual style, but it felt like much of the screen time was directed to setting the period mood and feeling, instead of advancing the story.

I kept waiting for the story to really take off, but it never really did. I could write the entire plot in a small paragraph (which I won't). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I couldn't escape the lugubrious feeling of the narrative. In my case, it kept from really understanding the characters and their motivations, and caring about them.

Even though it's a movie about John Keats, I felt like I learned very little about him by the end of the movie. It was as if there was an important subplot that was entirely missing from the story.

That's not to say there weren't good parts about the film. Certainly Cornish's performance was one of them. She does everything she's supposed to, and this movie only deepened my appreciation for her as one of the best unknown actresses working today.

But frankly without her performance, this would have been a dreadfully boring movie. The other interesting part was the Scottish-accented rants of Paul Schneider as Charles Brown, Keats' poet collaborator and friend. Brown serves as an antagonist to Frances' interest in Keats, although I never could really figure out what his motivations were. His words and actions seemed just to come out of the blue for me. Or are we just supposed to assume now that every male friend in a movie is secretly in love with the male protagonist in a repressed homosexual fashion? God, I hope that's not what it has come to.

But like I said, it's really Cornish that makes this movie interesting. I'd be shocked if she won the Oscar for this, just because it's not that big of a movie, but I certainly won't be surprised if she gets a nomination. In fact, I think she'd be cheated if she doesn't get one.

Agnes, I think you pegged this one right.