SALON

Friday, Dec 10, 2010 10:30 PM UTC

“The Tempest”: Helen Mirren’s sadly elegant mom-magician

Director Julie Taymor makes Prospero female -- but fails to shed new light on Shakespeare's much-dissected play

By

Topics: Helen Mirren, Our Picks, Movies, Shakespeare, Theater,

Ben Whishaw and Helen Mirren in "The Tempest"

It’s difficult, but not impossible, to wreck a Shakespeare play completely, and if there’s a reason to be grateful for Julie Taymor’s muddled, middling production of “The Tempest,” it lies in the fact that she doesn’t do that. A wizard of the Broadway stage who created the long-running “Lion King” musical (and the now-previewing Spider-Man musical), Taymor has what you might call a mixed record as a film director: I mean, everything she makes is a mixed bag. (Her last two movies were the Beatles musical “Across the Universe” in 2007, and the biopic “Frida” five years earlier. Make sense of that, if you can.) This is her second big-screen attack on the Bard, and it’s a whole lot friendlier than her gory, deranged “Titus” from a decade ago.

Which is not to say it’s, like, amazing or anything. Taymor approaches Shakespeare’s last play (unless it isn’t; that issue, like everything else about the greatest dramatist of the English tradition, is disputed) with great respect, staying largely true to its impressive text and general narrative outline. Her interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there’s nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera (i.e., Prospero), the deposed duke/duchess of Milan turned white-magic practitioner. (Vanessa Redgrave played a gender-neutral Prospero on the London stage 10 years ago.) What it does get you is, well, Helen Mirren performing one of Shakespeare’s most complicated characters, which can make up for a lot of other problems.

The thing about “The Tempest” is that there’s almost no way to bring something new to this tremendously allegorical and ambiguous play, which is highly self-conscious and very much unlike anything else Shakespeare wrote — is it a comedy? a romance? a “masque”? — and may be the most reinterpreted, overanalyzed and deconstructed literary work in the Western tradition. Since the play was first performed in the 17th century, viewers have seen Prospero’s final decision to abjure his “rough magic” and break his staff as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s own decision to end his playwriting career. More recently, Prospero’s relationship with Ariel, his “airy spirit” servant, and Caliban, his deformed, island-born slave, have been understood in terms of colonial and/or psychoanalytic theory: love/hate, black/white, North/South, ego/Id.

I suppose in offering a traditional rendering, or nearly so — it’s set on an island, with characters more or less in Elizabethan dress, Ariel (Ben Whishaw) as a naked holographic sprite and Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) as a near-naked, mud-encrusted African — Taymor is allowing us to pick up the story and run in whichever direction we choose. But I can’t help wishing this “Tempest” had more of a distinctive personality. Instead, it waxes and wanes with its cast, some of whom are fully up to the task posed by Shakespearean dialogue and some of whom just aren’t.

Hounsou gives a powerful physical performance, but simply can’t be understood speaking Caliban’s difficult blank verse about half the time. It’s no good being a proto-Frantz Fanon colonial rebel if we can’t make out what you’re trying to say. (He’s better when quieter, as when reassuring newcomers: “Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”) Felicity Jones and Reeve Carney, as the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand, are merely dull. Some of the best scenes in the movie involve stage veterans like David Strathairn, Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming, playing the nefarious if subsidiary trio of King Alonso of Naples, Prospera’s brother Antonio and the Iago-lite Sebastian.

If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ll know that English comedian and not-quite movie star Russell Brand shows up as the buffoonish Trinculo, playing him as yet another of Brand’s Cockney rock-star caricatures. Thing is, that fits pretty well with the dimwit character, who briefly becomes — along with his drunken buddy Stephano (Alfred Molina) — an instrument in Caliban’s planned insurrection against Prospera’s rule. Those enjoyments aside, this “Tempest” is all about Mirren, who plays the aging female mage with a mixture of conqueror’s arrogance and motherly sadness, lending her final words about the rebellious Caliban — “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” — a tragic ambivalence. (She does not call him a “demi-devil” and “bastard” in the same breath, as Prospero does in the play.)

Lovely as it is to hear Mirren read some of the most challenging lines ever written in our language, Prospero does not look, to our eyes, like an entirely sympathetic figure (not that he necessarily did 400 years ago either), and making him female does not relieve him of the white man’s burden. Ultimately Taymor’s reading of “The Tempest” is more dutiful than exciting, and it’s strangely bereft of the visual imagination and diabolical machinery for which her theatrical productions are known. Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, this one has evaded successful translation from stage to screen. Derek Jarman’s homoerotic reimagining from 1980 and Paul Mazursky’s lightweight modern-language version made two years later are all but forgotten. I admire Peter Greenaway’s “Prospero’s Books” for what it is, which is a self-referential digital art project using Shakespeare’s text as one of its elements (along with lots of naked flesh). But none of those films really comes close to capturing the dense and nettlesome mysteries of “The Tempest,” and this earnest effort doesn’t either. Is “Forbidden Planet,” the 1950s sci-fi reworking, with Robbie the Robot as Ariel and an invisible, perhaps imaginary Caliban, still the best movie version?

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 13 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
130 points131 points | 3 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
118 points119 points | 19 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
56 points57 points | 13 comments
vote
Doug Henwood: Capitalism Thrives on Class Exploitation
43 points44 points | 4 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
42 points43 points | 19 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations