I’d heard about it already, so I took my grad students to Taymor’s Tempest last night with low expectations. Lots of overly sweet stuff was already baked into the cake — the Harry Potter sound-and-light show, the distracting CGI versions of Ariel, the utter failure of the universal geometry she subbed in for the masque. Plus I’ve never seen a really good Miranda, & I wonder if that version of innocence simply isn’t playable today. Felicity Jones did not change my mind.
The good things were also mostly expected — the clowns were great fun, esp Alfred Molina’s drunken sea chantey, Russell Brand’s Trinculo was manic, and the island set was stunning. I’m somewhat on the fence about Djimon Hounsou’s Caliban. Cvered in earth & moonshine, he was visually overdone, but he projected real energy & physical charisma. The conspiracy scene was impressively dramatic. I liked watching the sailors go overboard in the shipwreck scene.
But what I didn’t expect was seeing Helen Mirren, a wonderful actor, fail so miserably.
It’s a play about power, & she didn’t project it. She had the wand, raised the storm, drew the flaming circle, stage-managed the lovers, bossed around the spirit, but she didn’t wield power. It’s pedantic to carp overmuch about cuts — any film has to cut some of Shakespeare’s language — but when she faced off with Caliban at the end, it seemed meaningful that he did not speak h is final line about needing to “seek for grace.” He just turned his back on her and left. She had nothing he wanted.
It doesn’t make sense that Prospera should be weak because she’s a woman, though Taymor’s film seems, according to her interviews anyway, to be bound up in cultural fantasies about motherhood. But mothers, as Shakespeare certainly knew, are plenty authoritative and plenty scary: remember Gertrude and Volumnia. Taymor ‘s film defanged her magician, minimizing her political delinquency in Milan and downplaying her aggression toward Ferdinand & her other dependents. The camera also shot Mirren mostly from above, making her seem frail. (Caliban, by contrast, was shot mostly from below.)
I like the idea of a female Prospero. But I’ve never seen a version of The Tempest before where the bits without the wizard were always best.
I loved Caliban! Maybe because this is exactly how I was imagining him… I have always felt sorry for him, and I liked how they made his eyes seem tearful. I didn’t have a feeling that he was overdone, though; his character needed to be grotesque in order to make an impression upon the audience. I do agree with you about Prospera: This was a film about everybody except for her. She did great in the beginning – screaming, she seemed kind of violent and ready to take revenge… yet after that she just disappeared. I didn’t have a feeling she had power, at all. Ferdinand turned out too melancholic! (Maybe this is just not my type of a ‘noble prince’ haha.) Overall, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, and definitely worth watching it. This is my general feedback.
On a whim, Patrick and I stopped in to a showing that had just started on Monday evening. We missed the first few minutes and there was either a projection issue or a corrupted digital file issue messing with it, so we only stayed about 40 minutes.
Overall, I felt like I got some of what I was expecting — I knew I was going to have issues with the decision to make Prospero a female character. I love the idea of a woman playing Prospero too — a part I relish tackling someday! But as you say Taymor definitely took the fangs out of this character, which was really disappointing. On the other hand what I was not expecting was a film that Julie Taymor didn’t seem to care that much about. Her design was pretty stunning. That was clear. But once I looked past the design elements, there didn’t seem to be any passion in this film. I did not think it was possible to have a Tempest that was uninspired, uninteresting. I didn’t feel the director cared or the actors cared, and whoever wrote the soundtrack did not even phone it in… In the end, I didn’t care either.
Re: Miranda. Felicity Jones was a hot mess… Also never seen a Miranda I’ve liked. But I am very excited about our Miranda for Bookend — if you check out the video I recently posted on my blog of me being stabbed in 3HVI … the chick playing Lord Clifford who does the stabbing — that’s our Miranda. Exciting!
At any rate, we got free passes to see the film again because of the projector issue… but I’m not sure we’ll make it back before it leaves the theaters.
If you stayed only 40 min, did you miss the clowns? A week out, I remember Trinculo & Stephano most clearly. The subplot carries most of the weight in the second half of the show.
The problems with hair-frizzly Miranda might be worth thinking more about. I always hate it when productions start with something other than the ship.