Also published on Cinescene.


HELEN MIRREN AS "PROSPERA" IN JULIE TAYMOR'S FILM OF SHAKESPEARE'S THE TEMPEST

A feast of sight and sound -- and fury, signifying not quite enough

Julie Taymor, who has proven her skill at exotic and spectacular staging both in theater and the movies, has said that The Tempest is Shakespeare's "most visual" play. And this, along, presumably, with the play's significance as a great final statement, is her reason for committing it to the screen (her first return to the Bard since the 1999 Titus). Herein lies both the strength and the complication of Tayor's Tempest, because if the play is Shakespeare's most visual, that's because images are most vividly conveyed in words. And if Taymor creates a dazzling visual spectacle to recreate the play, as she has done, she overwhelms the words, particularly the most important ones. Besides which, Shakespeare didn't want us just to visualize. He wanted us to think.

On the other hand, the play draws implicit parallels between its master of revels, Prospero, and the playwright himself, as a creator and simulator of marvels, and Taymor herself, with all the technical wonders at her command as a contemporary American director, successfully usurps that role. Modern stage and opera designer-directors are like some contemporary architects: in the supreme wisdom of their egos, they create works in which form dazzlingly overwhelms function, and image, to the delight of promoters, dwarfs meaning. Taymor's Tempest is a beautiful thing to watch (though there are plenty of more beautiful films), and it shows a thorough familiarity with the play, as it would, since she has directed stage productions of it. Though she has cut the text, as one must, she has not radically twisted it. She has just competed too much with it, while adding too little spin to the performances.

This is not to say that the language of the play is impossible to hear, or poorly delivered, or that the acting is dwarfed by special effects, though of special effects there are aplenty. It's hard to find fault with Ben Whishaw as Ariel. This Ariel is a creature of pale see-through imagery, who flits away and shrinks into deep space in an instant and leaves behind multiple shadowy after-images in the air as only CGI could allow, and still he is a fine Ariel, his performance as mercurial and delicate as the effects (which some think could be better, particularly in coordinating Whishaw's in-studio greenscreen acting with Mirren's). The visual airiness of Whishaw's Ariel is appropriately balanced by the earthy Caiban of Djimon Hounsou, who is coated in mottled brown and white and what looks like cracked mud, but whose powerful, vivid performance is not at all aided by CGI. Nor is there any CGI about Russell Brand's very Russell Brand Trinculo, whose garish outfit looks quite 16th-century, and yet quite like the way he actually dresses. If this is "stunt casting," still Brand has never been better, and his scenes with Hounsou and Alfred Molina as a convincingly, embarrassingly proletarian Stephano are the film's most entertaining. When these three, Caliban, Tephano, and Trinculo, are together, notably on a pretty barren landscape, fireworks happen, and it's all in the acting and the dialogue. This is only a foil to the main action, but it's an element that works.

Things get off to a bad start, however, with the earsplitting storm, which of course in Shakespeare's time could not have been staged very powerfully. In Taymor's film, we are rocked about with a floating camera that zeroes in on turbulent figures -- and so much noise of artificial tempestuousness that we can't hear a word of what they are saying. Maybe it doesn't matter. It's just prologue. (But then why are they yelling speeches at each other?) The film has done in this opening sequence what movies too often do nowadays. It overwhelms the senses and practically causes a heart attack before things have even begun. This is unlikely to have been how Shakespeare wanted to lead his audience into the calm scene of exposition that follows, where Prospero -- here (adding a superficial feminist touch) changed to Prospera (a worn-out looking Helen Mirren) -- explains to Miranda (Felicity Jones) what happened before she was conscious of things.

Felicity Jones and young Reeve Carney as Ferdinand are to be the young lovers. Carney is also to be the star of Julie Taymor's Broadway musical of Spider-Man. He is a musician who has a somewhat androgynous young ingenu quality. Neither Carney nor Jones is an actor of great distinction. A certain arbitrariness is characteristic of Taymor's usual castings. Using Mirren is the most obvious of these, but the feminism and genre-bending seem unexceptional given Mirren's universal acceptance as a great actress nowadays. Using a black man, Djimon Hounsou, as a slave was, in Taymor's view, a daring, and politically incorrect, bit of casting. But that depends on how the character of Caliban is presented in the production, whether as a savage sent packing by civilized colonists, or as a wronged native to be liberated. It's not quite clear what Taymor has in mind, but anyway, an actor as powerful as Hounsou has no trouble justifying and transcending the possible stereotyping of his casting. Whether his performance is part of a coherent concept of the character or the play is another matter. Whishaw, Hounsou, Molina, and Brand are outstanding. Mirren seems as usual articulate and intelligent, but otherwise uninspired. As the "court," the shipwrecked Alonso (David Strathairn), Gonzalo (Tom Conti), Sebastian (Alan Cumming) and Antonio (Chris Cooper) are highly competent, but not memorable.

The particular irony of Taymor's Tempest is that Shakeapeare's late romances are profound, outwardly simple in some ways, but subject to complex multilayered interpretation and rich in philosophical import. The Tempest has implications about the nature and power of art, the spiritual vs. the physical, new worlds, colonialism, the function of learning, morality and politics, and other themes, as well as perhaps being meant as Shakespeare's own swan song. Glitzing up the imagery, casting a bunch of big names, mostly from movies, and some total lightweights, and giving colorful landscapes (shot in Hawaii) and dazzling CGI free reign but not imposing much discernible interpretation in the direction is not the way to deliver material that requires serious thought. In short, Taymor has given us a very pretty, at times pleasing, at times over-loud, sometimes wonderfully and other times merely competently acted version of The Tempest that is intellectually unimpressive when it should have been the opposite. This is a Tempest for sensualists, not for smart people.

Julie Taymor's The Tempest was introduced at Venice Sept. 11, 2010. It was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was presented as the Centerpiece film Oct. 2. This is a Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films release that will open in US theaters December 10.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.