Bright star

A movie of beauty is a joy for an hour if not for ever. Jane Campion co-wrote and directed a bewitching movie about romantic poetry, Bright Star, that sets fresh standards for biopic period pieces. Unfortunately, like too many poems, it goes on too long.

Its cinematic images set out to express the exchange of looks and letters, words and moods, between a poor poet, John Keats, and a neighbouring amateur dress-maker, Fanny Brawne. They meet, his sick young brother dies of TB, they part and Keats himself also dies of TB at the age of 25 in Rome. Period soap, 19th-Century middle-class romance, period drama, the film could have been a pretentious prettily-costumed bauble, period.

Instead, for that first hour, it's an audio-visual treat. Working from poet Sir Andrew Motion's biography of Keats, Campion created a screenplay with some wit and passionate pretences. Australia's Abbie Cornish (Candy) co-stars as wilful Fanny, and Kerry Fox (Storm) plays her strangely offhand mother. The Brit part of the Australian-UK co-production accounts for the lead actor, Ben Whishaw (Perfume), the settings (including a delightfully muddy, scruffy Hampstead Village) and most of the supporting cast, notably young newcomer Edie Martin as Fanny's young sister. Her young brother's is a strong screen presence too (Thomas Sangster, recently cast to lesser effect as Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy). An American actor, Paul Schneider, delivers a rousing Scottish accent as Keats' obnoxious and overly protective friend, Charles Brown.

The movie looks divine, but its lead actors are not so acceptable. Whishaw's Keats is a wimp, not an inspired poet. It's hard to sense what he sees in Cornish's Fanny, who seems too keen on sewing up a lover rather than truly wanting to understand poetry. Brown and Keats do not convey their supposed join creative process. Nothing in the movie is as remarkably romantic as it must be to be believed.

The romantic couple's real story cannot be defied. Keats must go pale and cough badly, Fanny pout and weep. Too much for cinematic comfort by the end, many lines of their correspondence and his poetry must be recited reverentially on and off screen. Meanwhile, Campion's cinematographic motifs provide repetitive refrains of windows, fabrics, sewing needles, curtains and the Brawne family's clumsy, cluttered clothing. One lengthy set-piece with butterflies is a lovely conceit, like a magically memorable verse in a poem, but it and other fine imagery cannot lift the deadening weightiness of the whole movie tome.

Campion's final captions include an unforgivable rewrite of Eng Lit: Fanny did not pine in solitude after Keats' death. Some years later, she married and had three children. Understandably, we are not told that Keats had another female muse in London. Nor was it made clear enough that Keats was trained to be a surgeon, and could therefore have married and supported Fanny. Looking between the lines of Campion's screenplay, it's tempting to suspect that Keats was a very lucky man in his loves, friendships and posthumous glory. No so lucky with this biopic.