Once upon a time, there was a director I adored, named Julie Taymor. She made a gloriously over-ripe adaptation of one of Shakespeare's lesser plays; she turned a standard biopic screenplay about Frida Kahlo into a flashy visualisation of how an artist perceives the world; she thought up an insane jukebox musical using the Beatles as a metaphor for coming-of-age in the '60s that swings between the stupidly obvious and the visionary with abandon; and I loved every single one of them.
Then she made The Tempest.
For the full story, head over to On Chicago Theatre, where Zev Valancy and I take turns being more and more aghast at Taymor's complete rejection of directorial responsibility, sacrificing "vision" for a clusterfuck of ill-judged stunt casting, a bit of racist representation straight out of a 1930s jungle adventure, prosthetic manboobs, and Helen Mirren sleepwalking through a once-in-a-lifetime role. Is it ever much more than snide bitchery? Well... no, and why would you want it to be? Read it! It's fun!
07 January 2011
2 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
I haven't seen Titus or Frida, and admittedly I have heard very good things about both from many besides yourself, but many of your complaints about The Tempest are things I decided I didn't like about Taymor after just one viewing of Across the Universe, which, frankly, I've never understood your or anybody else's high opinion of. What you describe as "arbitrariness" and a lack of conscious "choice" or "overarching metaphor" I deemed pure and simple self-indulgence. The woman is a talented and creative visual artist, it's true--the sets and costumes were the only things I liked about the stage production of The Lion King--but she strikes me as subscribing to that touchy-feely, new-agey artistic philosophy that says any and all creative impulses ought to be honored, as if to suppress or reject a creative impulse, even in the name of things like coherency and subtlety, is somehow antithetical to the nature of Art, which ought to be totally unrestrained and spontaneous. She reminds me of an acting teacher I once knew who would warn against over-thinking by constantly spouting the maxim "Analyzation is paralyzation". (Sic, by the way.) There's a pretty well known quote by Fred Astaire that I think she would do well to ponder. You may have heard it. It goes: "What I think is the really dangerous approach is the 'let's be artistic' attitude. I know that artistry just happens."
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen THE TEMPEST but I'm right there with the other commenter when it comes to ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, which I found a painful experience and did not finish. I'm really scared if Julie Taymor can harness the powers of Helen Mirren and still make something worse than ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.
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