Starring: Helen Mirren, Russell Brand, Reeve Carney, Chris Cooper, Alan Cumming, Djimon Hounsou, David Strathairn, Tom Conti and Alfred Molina
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 110 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) is one of the best film adaptations of a Shakespearean play. Powerfully made, it can be seen as a commentary on the 1991-2001 Balkans War, with Taymor stressing Shakespeare’s point that revenge begets revenge, and that the causes of the original violence or betrayal can become so lost in time, that we end up ‘eating our own children’, quite literally.
Taymor takes a similar approach with her latest film The Tempest, which brings fresh insight to the Shakespeare play while still remaining faithful to it – in every way but one. In a brilliant stroke of casting, Prospero the magician is transformed into Prospera the sorceress, as played by Helen Mirren.
Using theatrical costumes that cross time and place in style and manufacture, and CGI effects that makes the audience feel they have stepped into a mysterious parallel world, The Tempest begins with the storm and shipwreck that brings seven men from the courts of Naples and Milan to Prospera’s island.
Prospera is the rightful ruler of Milan, who twelve years before, along with her four year-old daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones), had been cast adrift in a derelict boat by her brother-in-law, Antonio (Chris Cooper), who usurped the dukedom after her husband’s death by accusing her of witchery.
Prospera and Miranda survived, and found refuge on the small island which Prospera now rules, having banished its original owner and inhabitant, the beast-like creature Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), to an underground life of ignorance and servitude.
In her long exile on the island, Prospera has developed magic powers, and with the aid of Ariel (Ben Whishaw), a spirit trapped in a tree by a previous witch, Prospera uses these powers to summon up the tempest which delivers Antonio to her island.
Prospera wants revenge against Antonio, now Duke of Milan, for having ruined her and her daughter’s life. But there are others stranded with Antonio on the island, who all in their way will determine how Prospera’s plans are played out.
The most familiar lines in this last of Shakespeare’s plays, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on…’ are perhaps the most beautiful and mysterious that Shakespeare ever wrote, and Helen Mirren in her performance brings majesty and authority to their meaning.
The sense that life is a play, and we are all actors on a stage briefly, is brought to life vividly through the film’s special effects which merge dream with reality seamlessly. And although their words are sometimes difficult to understand, this is complemented by the Transatlantic cast who play their parts with relish: David Strathairn as Alonso of Naples, whose his son Ferdinand (Reeve Carney) falls madly in love with Miranda; Alan Cumming as Alonso’s devious brother Sebastian; Alfred Molina and Russell Brand as the buffoons Stephano and Trinculo; Tom Conti as Gonzalo, the king’s adviser and the play’s conscience.
Perhaps most successful is the radical interpretation given to Caliban, played with dignity and power by Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, Blood Diamond). Mindful of the era in which Shakespeare was writing, his Caliban under Taymor’s direction is the maligned, misunderstood slave upon whose back the colonial empires of the British and others were founded, rather than a beast or a devil.
It is Taymor’s ability to read Shakepeare with fresh eyes – the provocative pairing of Caliban with Shylock, Shakepeare’s other outcast, and her decision to replace the godlike magician Prospero with a woman – that makes Taymor’s Tempest, unlike Peter Greenaway’s purely visual Prospero’s Books or Paul Mazursky’s incomprehensible 1981 update, such interesting and imaginative viewing.
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