The Tempest

The Tempest is not the most riveting drama, the larger realization is after all a certain weariness with it. This is given to us as a magician who halfway through the story abandons his powers of illusion, who after conjuring to him the characters and plotting the story of revenge pauses to reflect on the emptiness of the endeavor. It's still powerful then, because we are all Prosperos alone in our island with the thoughts we conjure up to inhabit.

In Shakespeare's time, the inspiration for Prospero must have likely come from the scandalous topic of John Dee, the communion with spirits and visions through crystals certainly point at that as well as more broadly the notion of a benign magic. Magic since well before Dee and up to Crowley has tried its best to mask in so much hoopla what other spiritual traditions make clear from the start: that man is an embodied consciousness with the ability to direct that consciousness to vision. Shakespeare no doubt understood this was exactly his own art, a rich and complicated magic of conjured vision in peoples' minds.

So if this is to be powerful, you have to adopt a very intricate stance. Show both the power of illusion as vision and, contradictory, the emptiness of it, the fact it is underpinned by an illusory nature of reality. Greenaway masterfully did this in his Prospero film by having Prospero's creation of the play as vision, the vision lush and wonderful, and yet at every turn shown to exist on a stage.

Taymor is too earnest to strike this stance, in fact judging by the cinematic fabrics here she seems unsure of what direction to follow. She is an earthy woman so intuitively builds on landscape, volcanic rock under our feet. Pasolini could soar in this approach judging from his mythic films, her approach is too usual and without awe. The magic is also too ordinary. A few movie effects cobbled together in earnest as something to woo simple souls like Trinculo. Compared to the novel richness of Greenaway this feels like discarded Harry Potter work. And the cinematic navigation is without any adventure, as if Taymor didn't believe there was anything for her to discover outside the play, to conjure up in the landscape itself by wandering to it, so she never strays in visual reflection.

Mirren conveys the reflection as best she can, but that is all here, too little.

The Tempest shows a filmmaker just itching to let loose her turbulent, big-splash-of-a-canvas vision of Shakespeare onto the screen, and the itch, for better or worse, is scratched sufficiently. This is a work that takes the delightfully and eerily dark take on the Bard that Taymor had before with Titus and suffuses it with the computer-generated surreal landscape of Across the Universe. Whether you can really dig into Taymor's films or not, to varying degrees for some, at the least it's hard to ignore her artistic prowess, of pushing the envelope of what might be acceptable or just what is "normal" and stretching the boundaries until you wonder what boundaries are even for in the first place - that is, you wonder so that people like Taymor or Terry Gilliam can break them, f*** them about, and give audiences something different with the acting and the mood of the piece while, oddly enough, staying true to at least the original spirit of the source material (Beatles, Frida Kahlo, the Bard).

This time her Tempest is almost nearing all over the place visually, but luckily it's anchored on one of Shakespeare's most underrated works ; it's one of my personal favorites from him actually, a work drenched in fantasy and ideas of late 16th century God's law and man in the high and low areas of class, meaning those who have it (i.e. explorers) and those that don't Djimon Hunsou's native character. The big change to anyone who has read the play is that Prospero is now Prospera, played with big emotions and big movements of poise and stamina by Helen Mirren. Oh she's a force to be reckoned with, as a star and as a character that she's playing, and she's a practitioner of alchemy. This might already be subversive - in that time and era women like that were branded witches right away, but here it's something that is not only encouraged but flaunted - but then comes more 'colorful' though normal elements of explorers, washed up on the shore, and part of the King's army of sorts (Alfred Molina and Chris Cooper make up some of this bunch).

There's also a love story thrown in the mix between the two youngest members of the cast, actors whom, I'm sorry to say, I don't remember their names as they are kind of forgettable due to the script and Taymor's direction of them. I get the sense that among the rest of what she has to work with this is either the thing she's least concerned with, or she botched this part of the film. I didn't really buy any of this young-love stuff, not the interactions or the dippy acting, or even (to go back to the source if it's that) Shakespeare's dialog. This and a few other odd moments, such as a few scenes with CGI (some of it, though not all of it, with Ben Whishaw's spirit character Ariel who is up there with the clouds and the smoke of air) do detract from the quality of the rest of the film.

The rest of it, I should add, is a lot of fun, and extraordinary to take in. Djimon Hunsou makes his Caliban a terrifying but oddly sympathetic character, one who will do bad things and can- the scar on his face says 'Don't mess with me, Whitey' pretty clearly, even if it's said in old-school Bard speak- but has also been damaged over time. There is some depth there that isn't with some of the other supporting characters, as interesting as they are and acted as well as they are. Among the lot that I've mentioned and who are really excellent in scenes that just need plenty of good close-ups and not too much music, Molina, Cooper and a magnetic David Straitharn take up really good chunks of screen time.

The oddity here is Russell Brand. Appearing as himself, or what I can figure is him"self" after playing a similar crazy rock-and-roll type in Judd Apatow comedies, here he's kind of the Fool character, Trinculo, and it was kind of delightfully bizarre to see him here doing his thing with such gusto and humor. Maybe that was Taymor's intention, as with Mirren as Prospera in a way, to give this work that is centuries old and dealing with the aspect of Post-Colonial theory a modern uplift and change up the nature of the characters without taking too much away from their roots. But more to the point, one of the strengths of the film and that Taymor connected with is that Prospera's an artist in her own right, only with magic, and may be reckless with her 'art' but will go to the lengths that she will do to her will. An extreme example, but I have to wonder if what Taymor is doing here, as all over the place and great and not-so-great as it is, in its broad strokes its a really raw expression of her own art through this flawed ex-member of royalty.

Taymor's work is an "acquired taste" as the euphemism goes, another way of saying "go in at your own risk". The wild takes on set-pieces like the ship-crash, the trippy-hallucinogenic visions of characters, and the eccentric acting turn the Tempest into a curious delight, but you need to expect something like that. This is Shakespeare for the Modern Museum of Art group, not for stuffy intellectuals looking for Masterpiece theater. For its faults, some of them crucial, its alive and throbbing and that's good to have in this Awards season.

William Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST is probably his last play, written in 1610-11, and as such it has some of the more eloquent passages of soliloquies of any of his works. In the original version the story is set on a remote island, 'where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place, using illusion and skillful manipulation. The eponymous tempest brings to the island Prospero's usurping brother Antonio and the complicit Alonso, King of Naples. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's low nature, the redemption of Alonso, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.' Enter Julie Taymor and the imaginative play becomes even more so with her deft re-writing and direction and use of visual effects. In Taymor's versions 'the main character is now a woman named Prospera. Going back to the 16th or 17th century, women practicing the magical arts of alchemy were often convicted of witchcraft. In Taymor's version, Prospera is usurped by her brother and sent off with her four-year daughter on a ship. She ends up on an island; it's a tabula rasa: no society, so the mother figure becomes a father figure to Miranda. This leads to the power struggle and balance between Caliban and Prospera; a struggle not about brawn, but about intellect.'

Taymor and Shakespeare together make the important character of Ariel, Prospera's obedient sprite, a thing of magic: Ben Wishaw darts and floats and flies about apparently in the buff in a most ingenious fashion, delivering his lines in perfect Shakespearean cadence (his 'Full fathom five thy father lies... ' is exquisite). The transformation of Prospero to Prospera is magical with Helen Mirren once again proving that she is an incomparably fine actress (one great moment is her delivery of the lines 'Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.')

THE TEMPEST is an odd assortment of magic, treachery, young love, silly comedy, and odd goings on, but filled with a cast such as Taymor has selected it jumps alive with passion and glee. Caliban is Djimon Hounsou, Miranda is Felicity Jones, The King of Naples is David Strathairn and his son Ferdinand is young Reeve Carney, Prospera's brother Antonio is Chris Cooper and his sidekick Sebastian is Alan Cumming, and the two actors assigned to the buffoon roles are Albert Molina and Russell brand. Gonzalo is Tim Conti. This tightened Tempest works well though one wonders how much of the opening scenes' shipwreck (due to Prospera's calling upon the tempest) adds to the overall story. Yet in Taymor's vision it all comes together beautifully. The sung portions of the play and the musical sore in general are from the intelligent pen of Elliot Goldenthal. Recommended!

Grady Harp

The kick to see it was Helen Mirren as Prospera .

The gift of this eccentric, at first sight, is its beauty. Indeed, very easy to critic it but few scenes, references to classics, the locations, the residence of Prospera, the superb Ariel proposed by Ben Whishaw, like the touching Caliban- indeed the recipe of colonialism works, as suggestion in this adaptation , again, by Djimon Hounsou are just inspired option. Not the quality of special effects matters for me, but the fair storytelling of a story easy to escape to director in exagerations. It is not this case.

It is a beautiful film and Helen Mirren translates in inspired manner the bitterness and the generosity of her Prospera. The opportunity to make a film , not a stage play is used in smart manner. Not the best version. But far to be a modest one.

I am not a fan of male characters in Shakespeare being played by women, although it is only fair when you remember that when first written, all parts were played by men. However, I thought Helen Mirren did a brilliant and believable piece of work. At least the text had been adapted to reinforce the fact that she was female and we weren't expected to believe that she was Prospero and not Prospera. I thoroughly enjoyed this screen adaptation and although scenes that I looked forward to were cut out e.g., the Goddesses at the feast, the CGI was very clever. I thought that it was a mistake to make the casting of Caliban an African man, although he was disguised with scales and what looked like vertiligo. The purists see this play as about man's fear of anything different,(the other) and this plays into the post colonial criticisms by making the man black. Although Ben Wishaw did a sterling job as Ariel, it was a bit disconcerting to see his thin body running around naked. Especially at the beginning when he had to lie about with his leg discretely crossed in case he revealed anything he shouldn't. However, having acted in this play and seen several versions this was one of the best.