48th NYFF 2010: Julie Taymor’s The Tempest

Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of any of Julie Taymor’s movies, but this is really the rare case where I blame it more on my own personal taste than Taymor’s value as a filmmaker. For some reason I always feel the need to tune out during Taymor’s work. I’ve never been a Shakespeare guy, and I was always more Stones than Beatles. I enjoyed Frida more than any of her other films (further disclosure: writer Diane Lake was my screenwriting teacher in college). I acknowledge her as having some wonderful visual sensibilities, but I’ve always been annoyed by them more than anything else, just because I feel the style to be rather unnecessary and bloated.

Even without any knowledge of Taymor or Shakespeare, deductive logic tells you that, Julie Taymor is a talent. It cannot just be an accident or nepotism to get this kind of cast. Helen Mirren leads the charge here in The Tempest, with support from Djimon Hounsou (great), Alfred Molina (very good), Chris Cooper (very overplayed), David Strathairn (great), Alan Cumming (standard Alan Cumming), Ben Whishaw (can’t totally tell if this performance is ridiculous or if it’s just supposed to be that way), a small dose of Reeve Carney (likely to promote Spiderman on Broadway), and surprisingly Russell Brand (doing what he does best/the only thing he does—Russell Brand).

Dr. James Shapiro, who conveniently gave the talk for the HBO Directors Dialogue with Taymor at the New York Film Festival, uses the film as evidence to tout Taymor as just about the only one who can actually translate such a difficult play from stage to screen. She has directed numerous incarnations of the stage play, Hounsou actually reprises his role here, hence why he gets shared billing on the poster with Mirren. Or perhaps he’s on the poster just because he’s the most interesting visual image in the film. On that point, that is not a bad thing. Hounsou’s costume and makeup are fantastic, making him appear as if he came from the molten lava covered terrain the film takes place on. His performance is a standout, to the point that he seems literally embedded in the time and place this all comes from.

Taymor is clearly the rare combination of master of Shakespeare and also talented filmmaker. Few do it the way she does. Most film adaptations of Shakespeare attempt to do something new to the material, contemporize it, change the setting, things like that. Personally, I enjoy those more (Richard Loncraine’s and Ian McKellen’s Richard III, Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet), but Taymor is the rare Shakespeare purist who can actually make a film that satisfies the Shakespeare fans while also having some value for just general filmgoers. Comparisons that come to mind are Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood as predecessors to this.

Polanski’s and Kurosawa’s adaptations move more toward the cinematic than the theatrical though, hence why they’re easily re-watchable films, which is not the case for The Tempest. Most scenes are very long dialogue scenes that are hard to follow unless you speak Shakespeare fluently. There are brilliant visuals mixed in, but Taymor does not tell the story visually. The big visual effects and musical scenes are more spectacle than anything else. All of the story and plot rely on those dialogue scenes, which are unbearable if you are not into Shakespeare. Polanski and Kurosawa keep their films very visual, despite maintaining so much of the original dialogue. The Tempest rolls out a couple of dialogue scenes and then interjects with some large visual effect.

Stuart Dryburgh’s cinematography, Mark Friedberg’s production design, and Sandy Powell’s costume design must go unscathed in this review. Whatever can be said about the film, it’s beautiful. The camerawork does everything it can to maintain our attention in epically long dialogue scenes, and then the big vista shots look great. The sets and use of the Hawaii locations always add character, feeling, and life to the frame. You get very immersed in this world. The costumes are totally absurd but all really, are sewn in Oscar nom stitching. They use zippers in ways previously unseen, and definitely not appropriate for the time, but we dig it anyway. So removing the Shakespeare discussion and just taking it as a regular film, The Tempest boils down to a whole lot of expository dialogue scenes, and some flashy visual scenes. There is a big difference between a visually stunning film and a film that uses visuals to tell its story. Pretty images are nice and all, but that’s not what gets the larger mass into the theaters. We care much more about what they do with them. So yes, the style here is lavish and fun, but none of it’s all form over function. Watching Ben Whishaw fly around like Tinkerbell is nice looking at times, but could have been used to cut the running time down also.

Taymor explained that she worried that many would be upset by the visuals because she did not make them realistic. That doesn’t matter, the magical realism and fantasy is fine. It’s that none of it contributes to the story. She also said that words are more important than visuals, showing her hand certainly. These two comments together make me wonder why she decided to shoot with such overt style at all, and why not just focus on the words.