This film is two hours long. It felt like three hours.

I’ll admit, I have a limited tolerance for these period dramas. Basically, it has to have a fantastic story and fantastic dialog for me to like it – think A&E’s Pride & Prejudice, BBC’s Persuasion or Bleak House, or maybe even Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility for some examples – or else I find myself getting irritated at the uniformity and predictability of this genera. Bright Star has neither. The story is pretty minimal and one dimensional – boy meets girl, they fall in love, ends tragically. You don’t really ever find out what makes either of them tick. The dialog is no where near what it needed to be to make their rapid falling in love believable. Listening to them endlessly recite Keat’s poetry does not really clarify anything. You don’t find out much about Keat’s professional struggles beyond “my book is not selling, I have no money.” You don’t get to know her or find out why she is so spiritually (and sartorially) modern. The other characters are not really developed, even minimally as supporting structure. They’re all just cardboard placeholders.

I think the film lacks these fundamentals because Jane Campion was too busy obsessing over visual images. We are inundated with a constant stream of striking and beautiful visual images – distorted images of people through panes of glass or reflected in still ponds, ensemble images in exquisite flowering fields, graceful use of re-focusing and intentional blurring to create impressionistic effects, and some of the most detailed images of hand sewing I have ever seen. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But the problem is that the images are not in the service of the story. The images dominate the story. When almost every image looks as if it was planned to be the most memorable image ever, something has gone terribly wrong.

Think of how a truly great film like Enchanted April uses striking, static images: very sparingly, and always in a way that does not disrupt the viewer’s engagement with the story itself – the images support the story and the development of the characters, without exception. Bright Star is the opposite. Examples abound, so I’ll just pick one: the images of the younger sister fascinated by the butterflies are incredibly beautiful – really, I don’t think I have ever seen a child’s fascination with nature captured … with such artistic flair, let’s say. The problem is that it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the story. Even tiny things like the maid handing a coin to a delivery boy are done with a completely excessive amount of artistry. Bright Star is overrun by these visuals, partly because too much time and energy has been invested in their creation, and partly because the characters and story completely fail to distract us from them.

Let me also say that in my opinion the younger sister gets way too much airtime in this film. Sense and Sensibility got it right: there the third and youngest sister Margaret Dashwood has a few scenes with Hugh Grant, mainly to establish what a cool and likable guy he is, and then BOOM: she is gone for the rest of the film! Here’s the rule: if you can theoretically eliminate a character from a movie and have the main story lines remain completely unchanged, then this character should not be an artistic focal point of any kind.

As far as the acting goes, Ben Whishaw is good and very likable as Keats. Abby Cornish (who was really good in Stop Loss) was okay, I guess – she does some nice crying, but in general she plays it a bit too cold, hard, and modern for my taste. I was really surprised to see Paul Schneider in this film. He’s one of my favorite off-beat actors, but I am used to seeing him play American weirdos. It took a while for me to get used to him in this role, but then I basically liked him. He more or less brings his usual striking combination of frenetic energy and heartfelt warmth to this role.

As for the music, there is one little theme that is pretty effective, but their application of this theme in the telling of the story is inconsistent and sloppy, which limits its power. The duet at the beginning and the end I could really live without – I love that kind of thing, but this particular recording just sounds weird and irritating to me.

Another dud film in a really dissapointing year of cinema.