Posted: 09/13/2011

The Tempest

(2010)

by Joe Sanders

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was one of the last plays the playwright ever wrote. It’s one of his Romances, but the term “tragicomedy” might be more digestible to contemporary audiences. It means that the characters go through hell in order to [more or less] come out content and fulfilled at the end. The story is about the former Duke of Milan, Prospero, who is exiled to a deserted island with his daughter, Miranda, where he manages to enslave an all-powerful spirit named Ariel and a monstrous native of the island named Caliban. The play opens with Prospero raising a storm to sink a passing ship. Onboard is the King of Milan, his brother, his son, Prospero’s brother, and several other lesser characters who are all spared from the shipwreck and delivered by Ariel to the island. The play relies on a variety of dynamically opposing themes: The calm and the chaotic, the savage and the civilized, the powerful and the weak. The juxtaposition of these antithetical ideas is flawlessly transported to the filmic treatment courtesy of writer/director Julie Taymor (Titus).

At just under two hours, Taymor has created an incredibly efficient screen version of Shakespeare’s play. She works very hard not to waste a single moment of her runtime. How effective this is remains up for debate, but the effort she puts in is evident throughout. As a visually-oriented director, Taymor is able to use the film medium to add a new contradiction to the mix; blending the beautiful with the ugly. The island the film was shot on is perfect for the story being told. Different areas of the island look very different from each other and create a fantastical element to the overall product.

The most notable change in Taymor’s adaptation is the switching of certain characters’ genders. Here, Prospero is played by Academy Award Winner Helen Mirren and her spirit servant Ariel is played by actor Ben Whishaw. Prospero’s name is then changed to Prospera and a few small liberties are taken with the pronouns in Shakespeare’s script, but one masculine title remains for our Prospera: Master.

Mirren is fantastic here, bringing a complexity to the role that one might be hard pressed to find in a male counterpart on stage. She has Prospero’s traditional hard hand and cold demeanor, but her femininity being amplified by her love for Miranda (Felicity Jones) comes through in a way that a male actor would have difficulty recreating. The woman scorned trope is maybe a little on the nose in this version of the story, but Mirren and Taymor pull it off nicely.

Although Ariel is portrayed by a man here, Whishaw plays the spirit with a distinct androgyny, purposefully switching between male and female and leaving the character genderless. He even appears with small breasts at certain moments in the film, and is nude for the entirety. Again, this combination of innocence and weakness, along with Ariel’s capacity to rain down his master’s wrath is very effective in the film. Although it has to be said that the special effects surrounding Ariel here are definitely hit or miss. Seeing multiple Ariel’s running between trees works well, and when the spirit turns Jet black and grows enormous raven wings to terrify the duke and his companions, it is legitimately frightening, but when Ariel flies away and looks like he’s staying in one place while the world moves around him, it looks cheap.

Russell Brand is by far the weakest link in the cast. His entire time on screen is spent convincing the audience that he is not a Shakespearean actor, even though viewers will see this almost right away. His first scene is definitely his strongest, where he meets Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) and is subsequently reunited with his friend Stephano (Alfred Molina). But once the trio sets off on their plot to find Prospera and take control of the island from her, Brand’s reservoir of Shakespearean acting talent quickly disappears. He insists on regurgitating his lines as quickly as possible with no apparently understanding of what he’s saying. Thank God for Hounsou and Molina in these scenes though, who are both at the top of their game.

You’ll probably have to be a Shakespeare devotee to truly appreciate this film version, and even then, the first time through might be rough, but it has proved to be a movie that not only holds up on multiple viewings, but is enhanced by them. The film isn’t available on DVD - only and HD Digital Download - but this movie needs to be seen in hi-def so don’t let the lack of DVD release sway you. Taymor delivers a visually stunning rendition of The Tempest and it won’t disappoint in that department. Special features include two separate commentaries (one by Julie Taymor, another by “Shakespearean experts”), and an interesting look behind the scenes in a featurette entitled “Raising the Tempest.”

Joe Sanders is a playwright and college instructor in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has a Master’s degree in playwriting and a Bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Western Michigan University, where he currently teaches Thought and Writing.

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