The Tempest
I'm taking a break from our regularly scheduled Halloween marathon to bring you an advance review of Julie Taymor's The Tempest which screened last night at the Chicago Int'l Film Festival.
The Tempest is my favorite play. By far. It's not the best of Shakespeare's plays by any stretch, but it is the last and certainly most ambitious of his works. The story of Prospero's wrongful deposition from the Dukeship of Milan by his usurping brother, exile to an island where he gains mystical powers and his plot to right all wrongs done him is an odd blend of magic, social commentary, philosophizing and above all, an intentional exit from the stage for the world's most lauded playwright and a lasting testament to the power of imagination. The Tempest is Shakespeare's most introspective play, it's very clearly a journey into his own mind and soul. It's his final say on what he thinks of this 'brave new world' before he bows out. We have characters culled from all of his plays: usurping family members, conniving politicians, star-crossed lovers, monsters, fools and even the very incarnation of the muse which sings in all storytellers.
Shakespeare's characters in The Tempest are so varied and ambiguous that it's almost like a personal challenge from the Bard himself to make sense of it all. I've heard many interpretations, a storyteller's meditation on imagination, a Machiavellian meditation on power, post-colonial satire, pro-colonial propaganda, the list goes on. Julie Taymor's rendition recasts the male Prospero as Prospera, the duchess of Milan after the death of her husband.
Alack! This film is awfully weightless, and while the actors may be partly to blame, the real problem is the directing. What Taymor misses is cohesion. The Tempest in itself is not one character's tale, the cast of The Tempest is a playchest of archetypes whose movements in the narrative are fixed but the motivations and sympathies are very slippery. The director's job should be to sew these stories together visually and with careful acting direction to push the narrative toward a common theme. This is Taymor's first failure. She seems to have contented herself with each actor's individual interpretation of their character with no attempt at orchestrating them all toward a meaningful climax. Unlike Shakespeare's other dramatic plays, the story does not primarily chronicle the journey of one or two main characters. The Tempest is a series of vignettes between different groups of characters who have been strategically placed around the island at the behest of Prospero the grand puppetmaster. To make this work, especially on film, the director must find a way to insert a commonality of theme or interpretation to make the play's befuddling climax truly cathartic. This is not a play that a director/writer team can content themselves to just sit back and 'be faithful' to the source material. The Tempest is Shakespeare's erector set for directors, a 'Create-Your-Own-MasterpieceTM' package that a director must assemble with careful direction of actors, visual spectacle and (in a film's case) editing.
One would think that Taymor would at least have the visuals down pat but I'm sad to report that she does not. Her interpretation of Ariel is frustratingly literal. Ben Whishaw's otherwise semi-great performance is rendered in harsh translucence. You can almost see the blatant overlaying of Whishaw's form over the stark Hawaiian lava field set. The shots look like they belong in the pre-production section of a 'making-of' documentary or a rough effects test. His motion is equally as annoying. One shot in particular shows him literally leading the characters toward Prospera's circle of reckoning. It's a frustrating visual, that looks like the first thing that would pop into any schmo's head when reading the play. A translucent ghostly form gliding stupidly above the turf, his body so obviously suspended by a wire and callously superimposed over the shot. There is no interpretation between Shakespeare's stage direction and Taymor's vision of it. If the stage direction says Ariel flies away into the sky, then she will have Whishaw's stiff form hastily rotoscoped and tossed into the clouds with a bad trail effect. Whishaw's Ariel doesn't look spiritual, he just looks like he's not really there. Taymor's love of spectacle contrasts curiously with her lack of depth perception. It seems that she's never quite left the stage, and I suspect she had few collaborators commenting on the look of her film. I'm sure she had a costume designer but trusted herself to act as concept artist, thinking that hiring one would be unnecessary for a 'visionary direector' like herself.
It could be that this look is intentional. One can create the affect of genius by sort of throwing off the precedents of filmmaking in an effort to create something new or original or 'true to vision', and Taymor's strengths do lie on the stage, hence the visuals could have looked intentionally sparse, but a film is not a stage play (unless you're Lars Von Trier). This is a movie and blending theatrical minimalism and visual grandeur requires a particularly keen eye, one that I don't think Taymor has. Interestingly, though, there are precedents for this sort of look. Tarsem Singh's The Fall displays the sort of minimalist wonder that would have served this film well. In my mind, it even would have helped had this film been entirely done on green screen with a digital environment like 300 or Sin City. 'Visionary directors' (as Taymor is credited on all of her posters), tend to poo-poo computer generated effects simply on principle. There's a perception that a director's artistic vision is curtailed the more CGI is introduced. A lot of directors resist green screens because it's supposedly hard to solicit felt performances from actors on a blank soundstage, but this is exactly what could have worked with The Tempest. Wouldn't a green-screen soundstage be a perfect venue for a seasoned stage actor? The Tempest is often performed completely minimally with no set dressing at all in an attempt to highlight particularly grand performances. It's a matter of prestige for an actor to be able to fill an empty space like that with pure feeling and oral power, so why couldn't this work on a green screen and awesome visuals be added later? This would certainly be appropriate for The Tempest since it all takes place in such a mythical setting. Taymor's environment looks like a series of mid-grade sets. Not quite rich, not quite minimal, thoroughly dull, which is unfortunate since the island itself is a silent character in this play. This theme is given a bit of credence in one scene as Caliban monologues about the island's wonders, but the environment doesn't back it up. The whole place looks pretty unremarkable.
I do not think the main problem with this film was Taymor's lack of understanding of Shakespeare. As an experienced stage director, I believe she does understand Shakespeare, but she doesn't understand film. It is the cinema that eats up her play. Her hopelessly two-dimensional idea of film undermines her attempt at visual grandeur but it also ruins the actors' performances. The staging of this film is lost between the relative two-dimensions of the stage and the unavoidably 3-dimensional environment of the camera. The performances simply don't pop off the screen as in other adaptations. They're either swallowed up by sound effects (in the shipwreck scene) or dulled by the wide open spaces of the natural sets (Prospera setting her trap). They don't fill the space of Prospera's cavern or the Hawaiian lava fields. Again, the assembly is the problem. The editing is pretty abysmal (even I noticed some rough camera jumps) and a lot of the visual compositions (as when Ariel speaks to Prospera) are just downright lazy. Often, because of the digital overlaying, Ariel and Prospera appear to be looking past each other, so here Taymor is a paradox, at once making her special effects plain and literal, using the philosophy of the stage director, but doesn't even care to preserve stage fundamentals such as making sure actors' eyelines work convincingly. This is a particular instance that makes me think that there is little philosophy behind Taymor's visuals. They are poorly constructed. They have no goal, they are just a series of moving pictures, shot in different places, pasted together and the resultant lack of depth and attention to detail is distracting.
The acting ranges from mediocre to pretty good. Djimon Hounsou's Caliban is (I thought) impressively spirited. Russel Brand seemed like a good idea for Trinculo, but he shows little nuance. Alfred Molina's Stefano is more memorable. Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming get the job done but don't bare any teeth, though they do play the difficult roles of a pair of powerless villains. The standout performance was Felicity Jones' Miranda and the only real train wreck was Reeve Carney as Ferdinand. His delivery was painfully sleepy and his look was irritatingly hipster. It looked like he'd stepped right out of Brooklyn or an alt. country band...based in Brooklyn.
One thing Taymor does interpret with care are Ariel's songs. Music has long been a stand-out element of her productions. These sequences are carefully constructed, but are overlong and even do little to season the film with style.
This has been a long rant so far but I haven't gotten to my central disdain for Taymor's Tempest. I can forgive cut-and-paste TV miniseries visuals and even less-than-inspired performances from some of the actors but the thematic interior of this film (or lack of it) was the final blow. Mirren plays her Prospera far too down-to-earth. Her sole motivations seem to be reclaiming her Dukeship, doing good for her daughter and satisfying her conscience in the process, but Prospero is more than these things. The character is of higher mind than all the other players in the tale. They are the puppets and Prospero is the puppetmaster. He has earthly considerations, but he lives in the ivory tower of the creator. The island is his realm of imagination, where he can accomplish anything he wants. The island is the stage, and the stage is life. Ariel is the sprite of inspiration, Caliban the totem of the earth and together under Prospero's command, they do the bidding of the mastermind. This trinity is the makeup of the human mind. The human being is capable of spritely flights of fancy and the ability to imagine all things, yet stubbornly earthbound and downtrodden. Prospero's love of Ariel and disdain for Caliban could be seen as a statement of Shakespeare's own values. A playwright loves his muse but not his limitations, the reminders of his own mortality and the earth to which he must return. But all we get from Prospera's great 'wisdom' is a look through a Freudian kaleidoscope in which Ariel is seen changing gender whilst flying through space. It seems that the only real existential depth that Taymor is capable of portraying is the sexual, as if that is what is at the heart of all mankind. Ariel's gender-bending is not in itself a bad thematic move--(s)he is the spirit of all things incarnated which applies to both genders--, but placing that imagery at the center of humanity distracts from weightier themes of mortality and imagination. Thus, Mirren's delivery of the famous "We are such stuff as dreams are made on..." speech holds all the profundity of a dirty joke. Prospero is talking about the soul and lot of mankind which Taymor can only represent with Ariel's growing and retracting breasts, then splitting in two as if through mitosis and performing the holy Sexual Act. This interpretation is illiterate and ultimately says nothing about human kind other than that we are sexual creatures (and fully resists definition as to what that means). Taymor produces provocative imagery but fails to paint a nuanced portrait of the human being. Instead she uses sexuality to elicit a visceral response from the audience and create the illusion of depth. Shakespeare saw higher things in men. Sex was definitely included, but it was not worshiped. Certainly not beyond love. Taymor, in typical 21st Century fashion, conflates the two as one in the same. For Shakespeare, the center of the human experience was a bittersweet tension between the spiritual bliss of imagination and the harsh, monstrous clay to which we must return. For Taymor, it is a drug bender, a one-night-stand and a morning after.
One thing I will say, is that unlike a lot of naysayers out there, I don't think Taymor is pretentious. I just don't think she is a good filmmaker. She lacks focus and real intentionality to her errant visions. She is Mirren's Prospera, not Shakespeare's Prospero. She is earth-bound and frustratingly literal. She holds no dominion over the spirits of creativity. I will say that the end credits sequence was cool. We see Prospera's treasured books sinking into a deep blue sea while Ariel's song plays hauntingly over it. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn't fill out this fleeting vision. I wanted to love this movie as much as I love the play it's based on, but the film misses the point and fails to assemble the story and infuse it with meaning. Such a shame.
The Tempest - C
Alack! This film is awfully weightless, and while the actors may be partly to blame, the real problem is the directing. What Taymor misses is cohesion. The Tempest in itself is not one character's tale, the cast of The Tempest is a playchest of archetypes whose movements in the narrative are fixed but the motivations and sympathies are very slippery. The director's job should be to sew these stories together visually and with careful acting direction to push the narrative toward a common theme. This is Taymor's first failure. She seems to have contented herself with each actor's individual interpretation of their character with no attempt at orchestrating them all toward a meaningful climax. Unlike Shakespeare's other dramatic plays, the story does not primarily chronicle the journey of one or two main characters. The Tempest is a series of vignettes between different groups of characters who have been strategically placed around the island at the behest of Prospero the grand puppetmaster. To make this work, especially on film, the director must find a way to insert a commonality of theme or interpretation to make the play's befuddling climax truly cathartic. This is not a play that a director/writer team can content themselves to just sit back and 'be faithful' to the source material. The Tempest is Shakespeare's erector set for directors, a 'Create-Your-Own-MasterpieceTM' package that a director must assemble with careful direction of actors, visual spectacle and (in a film's case) editing.
One would think that Taymor would at least have the visuals down pat but I'm sad to report that she does not. Her interpretation of Ariel is frustratingly literal. Ben Whishaw's otherwise semi-great performance is rendered in harsh translucence. You can almost see the blatant overlaying of Whishaw's form over the stark Hawaiian lava field set. The shots look like they belong in the pre-production section of a 'making-of' documentary or a rough effects test. His motion is equally as annoying. One shot in particular shows him literally leading the characters toward Prospera's circle of reckoning. It's a frustrating visual, that looks like the first thing that would pop into any schmo's head when reading the play. A translucent ghostly form gliding stupidly above the turf, his body so obviously suspended by a wire and callously superimposed over the shot. There is no interpretation between Shakespeare's stage direction and Taymor's vision of it. If the stage direction says Ariel flies away into the sky, then she will have Whishaw's stiff form hastily rotoscoped and tossed into the clouds with a bad trail effect. Whishaw's Ariel doesn't look spiritual, he just looks like he's not really there. Taymor's love of spectacle contrasts curiously with her lack of depth perception. It seems that she's never quite left the stage, and I suspect she had few collaborators commenting on the look of her film. I'm sure she had a costume designer but trusted herself to act as concept artist, thinking that hiring one would be unnecessary for a 'visionary direector' like herself.
It could be that this look is intentional. One can create the affect of genius by sort of throwing off the precedents of filmmaking in an effort to create something new or original or 'true to vision', and Taymor's strengths do lie on the stage, hence the visuals could have looked intentionally sparse, but a film is not a stage play (unless you're Lars Von Trier). This is a movie and blending theatrical minimalism and visual grandeur requires a particularly keen eye, one that I don't think Taymor has. Interestingly, though, there are precedents for this sort of look. Tarsem Singh's The Fall displays the sort of minimalist wonder that would have served this film well. In my mind, it even would have helped had this film been entirely done on green screen with a digital environment like 300 or Sin City. 'Visionary directors' (as Taymor is credited on all of her posters), tend to poo-poo computer generated effects simply on principle. There's a perception that a director's artistic vision is curtailed the more CGI is introduced. A lot of directors resist green screens because it's supposedly hard to solicit felt performances from actors on a blank soundstage, but this is exactly what could have worked with The Tempest. Wouldn't a green-screen soundstage be a perfect venue for a seasoned stage actor? The Tempest is often performed completely minimally with no set dressing at all in an attempt to highlight particularly grand performances. It's a matter of prestige for an actor to be able to fill an empty space like that with pure feeling and oral power, so why couldn't this work on a green screen and awesome visuals be added later? This would certainly be appropriate for The Tempest since it all takes place in such a mythical setting. Taymor's environment looks like a series of mid-grade sets. Not quite rich, not quite minimal, thoroughly dull, which is unfortunate since the island itself is a silent character in this play. This theme is given a bit of credence in one scene as Caliban monologues about the island's wonders, but the environment doesn't back it up. The whole place looks pretty unremarkable.I do not think the main problem with this film was Taymor's lack of understanding of Shakespeare. As an experienced stage director, I believe she does understand Shakespeare, but she doesn't understand film. It is the cinema that eats up her play. Her hopelessly two-dimensional idea of film undermines her attempt at visual grandeur but it also ruins the actors' performances. The staging of this film is lost between the relative two-dimensions of the stage and the unavoidably 3-dimensional environment of the camera. The performances simply don't pop off the screen as in other adaptations. They're either swallowed up by sound effects (in the shipwreck scene) or dulled by the wide open spaces of the natural sets (Prospera setting her trap). They don't fill the space of Prospera's cavern or the Hawaiian lava fields. Again, the assembly is the problem. The editing is pretty abysmal (even I noticed some rough camera jumps) and a lot of the visual compositions (as when Ariel speaks to Prospera) are just downright lazy. Often, because of the digital overlaying, Ariel and Prospera appear to be looking past each other, so here Taymor is a paradox, at once making her special effects plain and literal, using the philosophy of the stage director, but doesn't even care to preserve stage fundamentals such as making sure actors' eyelines work convincingly. This is a particular instance that makes me think that there is little philosophy behind Taymor's visuals. They are poorly constructed. They have no goal, they are just a series of moving pictures, shot in different places, pasted together and the resultant lack of depth and attention to detail is distracting.
One thing Taymor does interpret with care are Ariel's songs. Music has long been a stand-out element of her productions. These sequences are carefully constructed, but are overlong and even do little to season the film with style.
This has been a long rant so far but I haven't gotten to my central disdain for Taymor's Tempest. I can forgive cut-and-paste TV miniseries visuals and even less-than-inspired performances from some of the actors but the thematic interior of this film (or lack of it) was the final blow. Mirren plays her Prospera far too down-to-earth. Her sole motivations seem to be reclaiming her Dukeship, doing good for her daughter and satisfying her conscience in the process, but Prospero is more than these things. The character is of higher mind than all the other players in the tale. They are the puppets and Prospero is the puppetmaster. He has earthly considerations, but he lives in the ivory tower of the creator. The island is his realm of imagination, where he can accomplish anything he wants. The island is the stage, and the stage is life. Ariel is the sprite of inspiration, Caliban the totem of the earth and together under Prospero's command, they do the bidding of the mastermind. This trinity is the makeup of the human mind. The human being is capable of spritely flights of fancy and the ability to imagine all things, yet stubbornly earthbound and downtrodden. Prospero's love of Ariel and disdain for Caliban could be seen as a statement of Shakespeare's own values. A playwright loves his muse but not his limitations, the reminders of his own mortality and the earth to which he must return. But all we get from Prospera's great 'wisdom' is a look through a Freudian kaleidoscope in which Ariel is seen changing gender whilst flying through space. It seems that the only real existential depth that Taymor is capable of portraying is the sexual, as if that is what is at the heart of all mankind. Ariel's gender-bending is not in itself a bad thematic move--(s)he is the spirit of all things incarnated which applies to both genders--, but placing that imagery at the center of humanity distracts from weightier themes of mortality and imagination. Thus, Mirren's delivery of the famous "We are such stuff as dreams are made on..." speech holds all the profundity of a dirty joke. Prospero is talking about the soul and lot of mankind which Taymor can only represent with Ariel's growing and retracting breasts, then splitting in two as if through mitosis and performing the holy Sexual Act. This interpretation is illiterate and ultimately says nothing about human kind other than that we are sexual creatures (and fully resists definition as to what that means). Taymor produces provocative imagery but fails to paint a nuanced portrait of the human being. Instead she uses sexuality to elicit a visceral response from the audience and create the illusion of depth. Shakespeare saw higher things in men. Sex was definitely included, but it was not worshiped. Certainly not beyond love. Taymor, in typical 21st Century fashion, conflates the two as one in the same. For Shakespeare, the center of the human experience was a bittersweet tension between the spiritual bliss of imagination and the harsh, monstrous clay to which we must return. For Taymor, it is a drug bender, a one-night-stand and a morning after.
One thing I will say, is that unlike a lot of naysayers out there, I don't think Taymor is pretentious. I just don't think she is a good filmmaker. She lacks focus and real intentionality to her errant visions. She is Mirren's Prospera, not Shakespeare's Prospero. She is earth-bound and frustratingly literal. She holds no dominion over the spirits of creativity. I will say that the end credits sequence was cool. We see Prospera's treasured books sinking into a deep blue sea while Ariel's song plays hauntingly over it. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn't fill out this fleeting vision. I wanted to love this movie as much as I love the play it's based on, but the film misses the point and fails to assemble the story and infuse it with meaning. Such a shame.
The Tempest - C
