Barney's Version, The Tempest and Casino Jack : Warming Up for Oscar

It's holiday time at the multiplex, when little films peep about between blockbusters in hopes of receiving some early awards-season notice. TIME's Richard Corliss takes stock of three contenders

By Richard Corliss Friday, Dec. 31, 2010
    • Melinda Sue Gordon / Touchstone Films / Everett Collection

    Actress Helen Mirren in The Tempest.

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    THE TEMPEST

    "It's about this old wizard who is trapped on an island," Stephen Colbert told Julie Taymor, his guest a few weeks ago, about her film of The Tempest . "I think of it like Lost meets Harry Potter ."

    Shakespeare's last play, which turns 400 this coming year, has always been deep and allusive enough to provoke the freest interpretations. Four previous film versions show the range of adaptive possibilities. In 1956, an MGM team turned the story into the science-fiction semi-classic, Forbidden Planet . Derek Jarman's 1979 The Tempest gave the tale a pansexual funkiness that fully justifies Alonso's remark, "This is a strange thing as e'er I look'd on." Three years later, Paul Mazursky's Tempest (with John Cassavetes, Molly Ringwald and, as Ariel, Susan Sarandon) was a study of male-menopausal restlessness. In the 1991 Prospero's Books , Peter Greenaway had Sir John Gielgud intone the text in a lavish indoor pool, surrounded by naked nymphs and satyrs; it was as if God lived in the Playboy Mansion.

    Taymor — who is currently trying to get the Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark into opening-night shape without loss of life or limb — made her feature-film debut 11 years ago with a splendidly vivid version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus . Her take on The Tempest , which Disney is releasing after selling off its Miramax subsidiary, doesn't have Titus ' sweep, gore, poetry or hard kick, but there's enough visual verve to keep the eye occupied intelligently. The movie is about as faithful to the Bard as Taymor's last film, Across the Universe , was to the Beatles. Which is to say, fitfully. Like the other film adaptations, this is not "The" Tempest , just "a" Tempest .

    The director's twist is that Prospero — the Milanese Duke who exiles himself and his daughter to a feral island when his reign is overthrown — is now a woman, Prospera (Helen Mirren). The old monarch's child hasn't changed sexes: Miranda (Felicity Jones), is still a girl, making The Tempest the second Disney-released film in a month about a magisterial woman who confines her doting daughter in splendid isolation (the first was Tangled ). Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), the brute creature whom Prospera has herself usurped from his position as lord of the island, is a Goliath with white patches on black skin. And Ariel (Ben Whishaw), the "tricksy spirit" whom Prospera also keeps in rebellious servitude, is more ethereal than ever: a rippling figure in the water, and very LGBT.

    The latest interlopers on the island, which by the end of the story boasts nearly as many visitors as Aruba in February, are a group of Milanese nobles. The convoy of supporting players, which includes David Strathairn, Tom Conti, Alan Cumming, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina and Russell Brand, displays a jumble of accents and acting styles — most painfully, Brand and Molina in the low-comedy roles of Trinculo and Stephano. The groundlings slapstick in Shakespeare is often a chore to sit through, especially when the actors are prodded into strenuous loopiness, as Taymor has done, instead of letting the characters' sublime idiocy speak through the text. It's a relief when the director unleashes a pack of fiery CGI hounds to chase Trinculo and Stephano briefly out of the film.

    Yet when the movie concentrates on Prospera and her menagerie of captives, its tone is sure and seductive. Mirren, who made her filmed-Shakespeare debut 42 years ago as a miniskirted Hermia in Peter Hall's A Midsummer Night's Dream , is, at 65, finally a movie star. She makes full use of her marquee majesty here, wearing short hair seemingly coiffed by a blind butcher, stalking around the island while proclaiming in pentameter, and investing Prospera with the rough authority of Prime Suspect 's Supt. Jane Tennison. Taymor sometimes envelops her star in hallucinogenic, cotton-candy back-projections of the woods and the sea.

    In moments like these, this Tempest shakes off its shortcomings and, as Ariel says, "doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange." Is it a film for Oscar? No, but at times it summons a magical blend of Shakespeare and Taymor.

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