The Tempest

Winds of change for sake of change

December 17, 2010|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Julie Taymor has the rare and semi-precious gift of artistic vision unhampered by taste. Wherever she turns her indomitable will — upon the Beatles in “Across the Universe’’ or the Bard in “Titus,’’ the life of Frida Kahlo on film or the sorrows of young Spider-man on Broadway — she dispenses high-minded excess yoked to mind-blowing production design. Her works are too much of a too muchness, inventive without a sense of play, creative without taking any joy in the creation. A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like “Moulin Rouge!’’ just dives right in.

“The Tempest’’ is typical Taymor, if in a minor key. It’s late-inning Shakespeare filmed on the volcanic beaches of the Hawaiian isles and warmed by Dame Helen Mirren as the gender-switched Prospera, magician and exiled monarch of the island. Those with very long memories may recall a 24-year-old Mirren frolicking nude on similar shores in 1969’s “Age of Consent.’’ In that movie she was like Miranda and Ariel both, and the recollection still seems to gleam impishly in Prospera’s eyes.

But there’s vengeance and mercy to dispense, a daughter to marry off, a sprite to free. Having arranged the shipwreck of King Alonso of Milan (David Strathairn), his ardent young son Prince Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), and Duke Antonio (Chris Cooper), Prospera’s treacherous brother, the mage leads them all astray through the wilderness. Ferdinand she brings to her daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones) and tests them both, she for maturity and he for constancy. The love scenes in this “Tempest’’ have the right hushed emotional intimacy, even if Ferdinand and Miranda have to sweat out their iambic pentameter on a field of volcanic scree. Carney’s a plank, a faded Orlando Bloom, but Jones gets the headstrong, watchful girl-child about to become a woman.

The best sequences in “Tempest’’ are all quiet, not that there are many of them. Any time Mirren settles in for a good ruminative soliloquy you can relax, but Taymor keeps bringing on the banshees and the jesters. Our first sight of Russell Brand as Trinculo is a hoot — he looks as if he has staggered in from the set of “Get Him to the Globe’’ — but the ribald lowbrow slapstick with Stephano (Alfred Molina, quite good) soon palls. Casting Brand turns out to have been a better idea than actually using him.