Last night we watched "Bright Star," a Jane Campion-directed biopic of John Keats that came out last year. I noticed that Haverford (my alma mater) got mentioned in the credits. It turns out the film uses a Keats letter from Haverford's collection.
Nice to get the mention, but I wish Haverford researchers could also have helped with some of the film's many anachronisms and inaccuracies.
For instance:
1. No one in 1818 would use "hello" is a polite greeting. They would say, "Good morning," "Good day," etc. The word "hullo" did exist as an expression of surprise or maybe to get someone's attention, but "hello" didn't come into popular use until the telephone.
2. Keats' lover, Fanny Brawne, wouldn't have been able to capture tropical butterflies in the English countryside — then or now.
3. Fanny appears to use a steel-ribbed umbrella that didn't exist until the 1850s.
4. It's unlikely that Charles Armitage Brown would be able to do a spot-on impression of a gorilla, since they were unknown in Western culture until the 1860s.
With that said, I enjoyed the film — though it was slow in spots. I'm also not sure Campion quite conveyed the excitement of poetry on screen, but that may just be a limitation of the medium.
Brown, who was a close friend of Keats, is presented as a boorish cad. He spends much of the first act of the movie insulting Fanny. That's only weird because the setting of the film puts you into a Jane Austen state of mind. And if this story were one of hers, Fanny would have wound up with Brown, not Keats.
BuboBlog Rating: 3 asterisks (out of 4).
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