Julie Taymor's "The Tempest" Unveiled

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 04 January 2010 13:21

Written by Laura Blum

In director Julie Taymor's film adaptation of The Tempest, the role of banished-duke-turned-sorcerer Prospero goes to Helen Mirren – with a twist. Dame Mirren isn’t playing a man. Rather, the lead character in William Shakespeare’s last play now bends gender, and the result is named Prospera.
 
During a press conference at the 14th Capri Hollywood Film Festival (Dec. 26-Jan. 2, 2010), Taymor explained that no currently working male actor was up to the task. What began as a frustrated quest became an exhilarating commentary on the driving spirit of Shakespeare’s fabled magician -- and how female powers of intellect can settle a struggle such as Prospero’s with the “savage and deformed slave” Caliban.

Come to think of it, as Taymor did, Prospero is Shakespeare’s only character who loses nothing by losing a Y chromosome. Further relieving her casting dilemma was the nod from 16th- and 17th-century history, a time when women practicing the art of alchemy were frequently exiled or worse as witches. By the time Taymor saw pink in Prospero’s soliloquy to the Medea of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Prospera was granted the artistic green light.   
 
Djimon Hounsou, Russell Brand, Alfred Molina, Ben Wishaw, David Strathairn, Chris Cooper and Tom Conti hold onscreen court with Oscar-laureate Mirren as she rules over the magical Mediterranean island.

In Taymor's interpretation, Prospera is trumped by her brother Antonio (Cooper), and set sailing with her young daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones). She shipwrecks on an island, where her efforts to protect the now teenaged Miranda thrust her into a power joust with Hounsou’s Caliban.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest has the potboiling pulse of a thriller, the special effects potential of a fantasy and the gossip of a romance. Advancing the action are spirits, monsters, a mournful king, a sage, two scheming brothers and a roiling sea frothed into a fabulous conspiracy that crosses the stars of two unlucky lovers.
 
Taymor’s version freshens up Prospera’s odyssey of vengeance and self-embrace in an era when forgiveness and love are arguably saner strategies than the cycles of violence-eye-for-eyed in our daily headlines.  

For fans of Taymor’s three feature films – an 1999 adaptation of another Shakespeare play, Titus; 2002 biopic, Frida; and 2007 Beatles rock opera, Across the Universe -- her newest production is an ongoing tribute to her eclectic style. At very least, this means a phantasmagorical swirl of theater plays, musicals and operas reinterpreted but not dumbed down for cinema.

Taymor toyed with film only after a couple of decades of live performance, including two stage productions of The Tempest. The Lion King launched her theatrical comet in 1997 and signaled the arrival of a visual innovator with global inspirations to match the gathering zeitgeist. Artistic wanderings had brought the 1952-vintage Bostonian up through French pantomime Jacques Lecoq, experimental stage legend Peter Brook, ensemble director Herbert Blau and the shamanistic traditions of Asian theater using dolls, shadows and masks.
 
For the Miramax release shot in Hawaii (and not, to the chagrin of her Capri Hollywood Film Festival hosts, right there or in another island connected to the Italian setting of Shakespeare’s play), Taymor made some tough concessions to the medium. Reluctant to break the four walls of cinema, she killed Prospera’s epilogue beseeching the audience’s “release…from (her) ban,” and clinching the loss of her magical charms. She opted instead to roll credits over images of drowned books, a visual quote from the earlier Metamorphosis scene referencing sorcery.  
 
Still, if you listen up, you may hear Prospera – and Taymor – close with the appeal, “Let your indulgence set me free.”    

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