Abbie Cornish is an intelligent actress playing an intelligent but non-cerebral woman in Bright Star (2009), written and directed by Jane Campion.  Her, Cornish’s, Fanny Brawne is dignified, passionate, agonized; in short, the performance is magnificent.  Ben Whishaw, who enacts the English poet John Keats—Brawne’s real-life lover—is unerring, and the film is a gem.  It centers on the John-and-Fanny romance and suggests that amatory love, when it isn’t painful, is as beautiful as a Keatsian poem.

Cover of Bright Star