Alternate Best Actor 2009: Ben Whishaw in Bright Star

Ben Whishaw did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying John Keats in Bright Star. 

Bright Star depicts the romance between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). A film I must admit I more so appreciated, particularly in terms of the aesthetic, than I loved or fully connected with. 

Ben Whishaw plays the poet John Keats, and is ideally cast as Whishaw just has that particular look of the suffering poet innately in his presence. Whishaw's manner is consistent in crafting the innate sense of illness with the man who is ever dying from tuberculosis and is ever in pain from that. Whishaw merely wears it within his physical performance and you just are always granted the sense of the man being unwell. That is both in terms of the overt, but also just the sense of a man conditioned to pain. There is a meekness within Whishaw's performance not of a man retiring from life but rather constantly suffering from it. This is only amplified by the man who exists in a kind of purgatory as an unappreciated poet by most. And in Whishaw's performance again he speaks as a man who is certain in his own belief in his words but is uncertain in terms of having his place within the world. When he speaks of the critical reaction to his work, which often is hostile, Whishaw speaks matter of factly, but there is this almost learned dejection in this man. Whishaw coveys a man who cannot believe in the dream, rather he just exists in the ever-constant sense of failure of some sort. He's careful to project a man not writhing in it, but rather existing in it, where there lies the tragedy because there is this degree of acceptance that in a way seems as crushing as his physical ailments. 

The focal point of the film is his relationship with Fanny which is a relationship built upon by words of the two individuals, in a time of sort of an innately repressed state of mind between people. Their conversations are designed to be revealing and that is where the performances of Whishaw and Cornish are most key. Because a lot of what is said between the two of them is very much alluding to something more, or perhaps commenting on something else, and what the performers have to do is create connection within the conversation, even when the conversations are separate from that connection in some ways. Whishaw and Cornish excel in this particularly as the chemistry isn't what one would describe as "red hot" in the modern sense. They are both very subdued in their interactions yet it is within the subtle way we see them respond to one another where there is so much spoken within the lines they utter to one another. There is a life that both develop in their eyes that seems to reveal itself in every conversation, and in every conversation, there seems to be more within each of them that makes them that much more whole. While I'm not entirely sure, for me, the film got over the tremendous hump of making writing cinematic, which is always a difficult task, where the film did succeed was finding where words speak even more than what they represent, by what is going on within the person that is speaking them. 

Within the scheme of the film the two are tremendous in creating a connection every time they speak to one another, whether or not is in more public situations, particularly when around Keats's friend, the somewhat roguish Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), or when they are at their most intimate. In each subsequent conversation the connection builds between the two, and while their demeanor doesn't change vastly the small intimate changes in their work allude to far more in their relationship. The interludes between these moments still often connect them as we see Keats write his romantic poems which Whishaw recites quite beautifully with the right spiritual sense that defines the man as so quietly believing in every word he grants to the woman he loves. And with the love that is created between the two Cornish and Whishaw remarkably find the power within the confines of the period of repression. Their moment, which is the closest scene to a consummation overtly, is powerful in the way the two go as far as they can in the embrace and seeing where each has come from in this different kind of courting, is quite wonderful to see the two explore as they do. Even as it moves towards tragedy they succeed in making the emotion within the muted qualities of this world and create effectively the potent sense of this relationship even within the confines of the societal expectations of the time.