A film of the opening minutes of Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of The Tempest was made in 1905. But there was no cinematic follow-up until after the second world war, when the play inspired a western (William Wellman's Yellow Sky) and a remarkable sci-fi yarn (Forbidden Planet), neither using Shakespeare's text. Then came Paul Mazursky's likable The Tempest (John Cassavetes as a self-exiled New York architect), which also dispensed with the text, and Derek Jarman's homoerotic version, which uses Shakespeare's words and turns the masque into a cabaret featuring Elisabeth Welch singing "Stormy Weather" with a chorus of prancing matelots. Peter Greenaway's postmodernist Prospero's Books had the 85-year-old John Gielgud (fulfilling a dream of playing Prospero on screen) speaking the lines of all the characters.
A decade ago, Julie Taymor made a well-acted, at times breathtakingly inventive film of Titus Andronicus that modulated from the ancient world into something like Mussolini's Rome.
Her interpretation of The Tempest is less adventurous. The cast is Anglo-American, the exteriors filmed on rocky, volcanic terrain in Hawaii, the interiors in a Brooklyn studio and the costumes are the work of the great British designer Sandy Powell. Taymor's principal innovation and the movie's greatest asset is the casting of Helen Mirren as Prospera. This necessitates a little fiddling with the text, which is more than made up for by Mirren's commanding presence, the sensitive delivery of her lines and the way she imbues with warmth and humour a character usually played as bitter and aloof.
Otherwise, the villains do not come over with any force: the low-life figures (Alfred Molina and Russell Brand) are as unfunny as ever, the romantic young couple are insipid, and the magnificent Beninese actor Djimon Hounsou as Caliban is robbed of his natural dignity. The special effects are intrusive and anything but magical and the text is rather curiously edited. But it's worth seeing for Mirren.
