Helen Mirren controls the weather in The Tempest, Julie Taymor's gusty, peripatetic screen version of Shakespeare's thunderous play. As Prospera, a female iteration of the original's vengeful wizard, she rules the island to which she was condemned, the sky above it, and the sea that tosses at its shores. Mirren also does her level, ensorcelling best to give ballast to the film's erratic tone by force of will and peerless commitment. She stalks the heath, herds the youngsters, and trades commands for unerring obedience with her wispy spirit, Ariel (Ben Wishaw, nude and denatured). Yet she cannot wrest the film from the meteorological whims of Julie Taymor, princess of the plodding, mistress of mayhem.
In many ways Taymor has chosen a play well suited to both her tendencies and those of cinema itself: Full of supernatural asides and flights of beastie-driven fancy, The Tempest stands to benefit from a translation to the realm of forbidding landscapes and impressionistic effects. And yet as often as her interpretation sends chills -- Prospera and her daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones) live in a rugged limbo land; Ariel is a sweet, ghostly manifestation between flesh and fairy dust -- they wrench to mind an arid, self-impressed starkness or, say, a prog-rock album cover.
Prospera, a Duchess exiled from the court in Milan by a trap laid by her brother (Chris Cooper) and his co-conspirator for power (Alan Cumming), causes a ship carrying that duo, their King (David Strathairn), his son the Prince (Reeve Carney), the King's aide-de-camp Gonzalo (Tom Conti) and a pair of easily deluded jesters (Alfred Molina and Russell Brand, frick and jabbering frack) to be tossed upon her shores. Taymor moves methodically -- occasionally too methodically -- between the new configurations of couplings, trios and foursomes Prospera's tempest formed. Molina and Brand come upon the fearsome, fearful Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), the occultish major domo of the island before Prospera claimed it as her own. Together they conspire against her, with Caliban, painfully, meaningfully bent on servitude, vowing to make Molina his -- and the island's -- ruler. The King and his consorts search for his son, a journey addled by insurrection and the spectacular mind-effing Prospera dispatches from her medieval modernist lair.
For her daughter Prospera has a more maternal but no less manipulative plan: Marrying the prince. Carney can't quite get there as the feather-haired beau, and he issues his oaths of infatuation with all the earthly feeling of a Wal Mart greeter. I kept wishing Wishaw might have pulled double duty; eventually I just started grafting his face onto Carney's. For Wishaw also has a command of the language that, along with Mirren, sets the film along its proper axis. I found their exchanges delightful, ripe with strange longings and regrets. And yet in other instances, such as the opening storm, Taymor drowns the words in bluster, or deflects from their rhythm and meaning with vamping and coquetry (I'm looking at you, Brand). Hounsou is haunting as the blighted native, and inhabits Caliban so fully that his pathos ripples from the screen.
Veering between the windswept and the simply windy, The Tempest, I suspect, will provoke purists and only intermittently win the attention of less interested parties. Structurally, it's too itinerant and prone to distention to do better, despite a feast of a cast and a director whose eye for the spectacular, when focused, can not just register a moment but rivet it to the brain. The ravishing final shot is renewed proof --and proof enough -- of that.