The Tempest

Review

Although it falls off precipitously, it’s better to have Julie Taymor’s The Tempest than not: The first half-hour is nearly as unfettered as Shakespeare’s language. Shooting on Hawaii’s Lanai, where cliffs of volcanic rock border rainforest bordering desert, Taymor suits the landscape to the words. Whenever the wizard Prospero�or, as played by Helen Mirren, Prospera�summons her enslaved spirit Ariel, the screen goes electric with FX. Ben Whishaw is the genie of one’s dreams: semi-transparent, his chiseled visage shifting in an instant from mischievousness to melancholy. He soars into the air leaving coils of himself in his wake, then serenades the tempest-tossed (in songs set by Elliot Goldenthal) in an ethereal tenor. To think what Taymor might do with Puck or the three witches!

Even in those early scenes, though, there are signs of trouble. The landscape is so remarkable it’s hard to credit Prospera with stage-managing the shipwrecked party’s illusory ordeals. And Mirren is small-scaled, snippy, without much variety or vocal power. Changing Prospero’s sex has its ups and downs. Her brother’s usurpation of her dukedom becomes an injustice against her womanhood, which works fine. What doesn’t is that this raging feminist would go on to use her magic to orchestrate the marriage of her naïve daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones), to Prince Ferdinand (Reeve Carney). Wouldn’t she want Miranda to exercise free will? I would�but I’m biased. Jones is a dish and can speak the verse, while Carney, though pretty, swallows his words and sings off-key. Miranda could do better.

The Tempest is the most plotless of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, and even the best productions have a hard time establishing a credible threat to Prospero’s authority. The African-born Djimon Hounsou makes a grand entrance as Caliban, rising nearly naked from the earth with patches of cracked soil in place of skin, but he’s stuck bellowing all his lines at the most misdirected troupe of comic-relief plotters (among them Russell Brand and Alfred Molina) in the annals of Shakespeare films. The drama is so muddled that Shakespeare seems to be getting in the way of Taymor’s spectacle, the magic long gone by the time Prospera hurls her staff off into the sea. — David Edelstein