Which is to say: "The Tempest" is bad. Like, really, really bad.
But it does have a nice title card: large, crisp font, taking up much of the screen, superimposed over the arresting, surreal image of a tiny sandcastle in the palm of a young girl's hand. But once this image is gone, and it's gone fairly quickly, the goofy overwrought nightmare that is "The Tempest" consumes you.
The plot is classically Shakespearean, with the three threads interweaving haphazardly throughout until they all reconcile at the end, with a message that is less about vengeance and more about forgiveness and moving on. A nice sentiment that still resonates four hundred years later. (There's also some stuff about Prospera's daughter getting involved with Ferdinand, played by Reeve Carney, but those are probably the dopiest sections of the already dopey movie.)
But, amazingly, this is the tip of the bad-taste iceberg, as throughout the film, Taymor takes advantage of the digital visual effects she fell in love with on her borderline unwatchable Beatles jukebox musical "Across the Universe," to turn Ariel into a swarm of frogs, a giant crow, and a pack of flame-breathing dogs. The effects, supervised by the amazing title designer Kyle Cooper, have an ethereal look that doesn't conjure magical surrealism but a rather a liquidy impermanence. All the while, Ben Whishaw, a normally fine actor, does his best to look dignified, even when his face is being digitally painted into the trunk of a tree and his hair has more product in it than the entire cast of "Jersey Shore" (he looks slightly electrocuted).
Taymor keeps large sections of the text, and outfits her characters in decadent duds (we'd kill for one of those YSL-ish leather jackets) that she said were meant to symbolize timelessness. What they really symbolize is a director more comfortable with camp than with craft, and the way she shoots much of the movie, with the actors taking up the foreground of the shot while the backgrounds (the movie was shot on location in Hawaii) turn into indistinct mush, robs the movie of any sense of scope. It becomes less about the text, the amazing actors that are saying the lines, and the scale afforded by motion pictures, and more about Taymor's lackluster staging.
Bogglingly, "The Tempest" is the "Centerpiece Film" at the New York Film Festival and closed out Venice earlier this year and is being groomed by some as an Oscar heavyweight, once it opens in December. It's absolute absurd to think this, and we're quick to peg it as this year's "Nine:" a movie that seems to have prestige written all over it, until people actually see it. Or, in the words of the Bard: "the past is prologue." [D]
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