'The Tempest' goes from Bard to bored

Men portrayed Shakespearean women on the Elizabethan stage, but women have been stepping into the playwright's male roles for a long time, too - Sarah Bernhardt was renowned for her "Hamlet," and that was in the 1880s. So the presumption of audacity in Julie Taymor's gender-bender, "The Tempest," seems like so much scholastic cluelessness.

Fortunately for her, and us, the woman she has stepping into the magical shoes of Prospero/Prospera is Helen Mirren, who could breathe lusty life into the reading of a Renaissance phone book. Knowing whence her character comes, Mirren as Prospera casts spells, cooks up vengeance on the foes who have sent her and daughter Miranda (Felicity Jones) to their remote outpost. She leads a cast that has been modernized for ultimate PC content - a Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) who critiques colonialism; an androgynous Ariel (Ben Whishaw). Most of all, Mirren exhibits intelligence.

It's a lonely job. Shakespeare's final play, "The Tempest" is a bewildering work. Any ambitious production - and this "Tempest" is, at least, technically ambitious - ought to make some contribution to the arguments. You get little insight here.

But the campaign behind selling Taymor as a film director has been going on for a long time. (She's best known for her work on Broadway, including "The Lion King," which will be playing until we have colonies on Mars, and now, "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.") But sensational production design does not a cinematic storyteller make. Taymor - as she showed in her appalling "Titus" - is willing to contort any and all source material for very small, and very personal, advantage. It's a lot of sound and fury, one might say, with the usual significance.