Don't be fooled by the title. "Brightest Star" is a surprisingly lusterless look at the frustrations of a recent college grad. Some times it seems like director Maggie Kiley is taking those frustrations---the grad can't get over his ex or find a job he likes---in interesting directions. This is her first feature film and its glimmering criticisms of romance are promising. In particular, the contrast between the girl that Kiley's protagonist is consumed by and the things he's actually good at, suggest an opportunity to stray from the beaten path of young Manhattanites in love. Take a scene in which our nameless grad (Chris Lowell) stacks together a deli sandwich. The colors and cinematography of that sequence are more sensual than any of the sequences in which he swaps stares with his lithe love interest (Rose McIver). He's a chef in the making. He's more than a distracted school boy. But by its last panel, "Brightest Star" seems defeated by its adherence to the dreary rules of first-love. Its insights concerning self-definition don't really get to shine.
At the beginning of the movie, Lowell's committed boyfriend is dumped by his girlfriend, Charlotte (McIver). At that point, she's just a pair of determined high-heels walking out the front door. In flashbacks, we get the full picture of how the two met as students during an astronomy lecture. Following a stint of friendship, they fell in love. He fell harder than her, though. After graduation, Charlotte got a fancy marketing job and he turned into a stay-at-home hubby type, watering his ardor for their relationship all day. Fairly understandably, this turned Charlotte off. Who could really be that much for one person? Cut back to those determined heels making a split for it.
Kiley encases her boy's subsequent gloom with reiterative shots of Lowell looking off into space. Or we get glowing Charlotte looking into the camera. She smiles and peeks over her shoulder, her blonde-hair waving in slow motion. The shot doesn't elicit more than the sense that an ideal, generic woman is haunting the mind of a quick-to-kiss-you, quick-to-love you man who describes Charlotte as his "soul mate" before they even introduce themselves. Such mooning was already overdone last year by Spike Jonze and Joaquin Phoenix in "Her". Charlotte never really feels like a real person. Any character she has is subsumed by this lovelorn guy. Even when she shows substance, it's shuttered. An art student, Charlotte trumpets her creative beginnings and talks about the colors she made from pastels as a little girl. In turn, all her boyfriend can think to ask is "If we were a color, what would we be?"
To its credit, "Brightest Star" does try to illuminate the pitfalls of its hero's unhealthy reverie. His plot to win Charlotte back creates a bigger mess. Landing a corporate gig, he ends up caught in a web of infidelity, dissatisfaction, and Windsor-knotted ties. Lowell can be fun to watch in all of this misguidedness. He shows hints of energy that bring to mind the boyish charm of Jake Gyllenhaal. But his performance may be a little too low-wattage. The performance that really makes "Brightest Star" worth watching is from Allison Janney. She plays a no-bull astronomer with laser vision into the real potential of Lowell's wondering man. The moment she tells him that he holds his cigarette like a middle school girl, the movie's starry-eyed pity-party is over. Wonderfully dry and funny, Janney is "Brightest Star's" much-needed element of steel.
