When I heard that Julie Taymor was making “The Tempest,” the most magic and pageant-filled play in Shakespeare’s canon, I immediately thought: Wow! Puppets! Psychedelic animation! A surrealistic special effects bonanza with visual poetry to complement the verse…”

Well, there are some wonderful sets and a couple of neat tricks, and also the odd bits of very cheesy CGI, but for the most part, Taymor has built her film with the values of theatrical purist, centered around a masterful ensemble cast and their interpretations of the text.

It’s hard to argue with putting the text and the characters front in center in a Shakespeare production—but with “The Tempest” on screen, there are some tricky decisions.  This is a play that opens with a shipwreck created through dialogue—a treat in a playhouse but unnecessary in a film when you can show a shipwreck more vividly than it can be described. It’s a play with a first act overburdened with relentless exposition. Taymor largely rejects the obvious cinematic solution to this challenge, flashbacks with voice-overs, in favor of real-time speeches.

“The Tempest,” thought to be written at the end of Shakespeare’s career partly around a desire to showcase his mastery of stagecraft, features long interludes in which spirits create elaborate visual illusions to amaze, delight and terrify. These bits get shockingly little attention from a director known for her capacity to dazzle visually. She seems only to be focused on plot.

Taymor’s main impetus for the film is the casting of Helen Mirren as the all-powerful magician, Prospero, or Prospera as portrayed by the Dame. There is no particularly provocative payoff to changing the gender of this domineering patriarch. Nothing much is pushed, twisted or elucidated in the text, but plenty is lost: the idea of Miranda growing up without female role models, with notions that men can only be Prospero’s (conquering, cloistering, tyrant/protectors) or Calibans (feral would-be rapists) and the idea of European logoscentricity defeating/enslaving the chaotic natural world once ruled by the Sycorax, the (mystical female) witch.

The point of the casting choice seems to be simply: Helen Mirren is remarkable at acting Shakespeare, she’s the right age to play this part, and it would be cool to see her interpretation. Fair enough on all counts. She is wonderful in creating a Prospera who is supremely confident in her ability to inflict her will through magic but conflicted about just when and how to do so.

Mirren is surrounded by a universally wonderful cast. As Prospera’s daughter Miranda, Felicity Jones exhibits a perfect blend of subtle frustration with her overbearing mother, a gentle sensitivity to the plights of all those around her and, the character’s defining trait: pure wonder, without falling into the trap of cloying naïveté.  As her suitor, Ferdinand, Reeve Carney plays a twerpish but endearing, slightly awkward, sheltered teen, torn between his nice-guy nature and the example of the entitled noble, set by his courtier elders.

The most delightful surprises from the cast are the inspired performances by Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming, who resurrect the story’s most pure villains, Antonio and Sebastian, from sneering caricatures, to a genuine Cassius and the genuinely amusing, hapless jester upon whom he preys.  They fix their plots upon a wonderful King Alonso in David Straithairn, at once regal in his bearing and petulant in his self-absorption, and are well foiled by Tom Conti’s oppressively good-natured old idealist, Gonzalo.

Equally inspired is the selection of Russell Brand to play Trinculo, the play’s one character who is actually a fool by trade. Brand plays the role as a crazed cockney marionette.  He and Alfred Molina as Stephano the drunken butler, balance buffoonery with glimpses of genuine scariness in their willingness to become slave masters to Caliban and would-be-usurpers of Prospera, mirroring the postures of Sebastian toward Alonso, Alonso toward Prospera and arguably, Prospera herself toward Caliban. Funny as Brand and Molina are though, there is oddness in the pacing of their scenes. You’re waiting for them to go all the way out there into the slapstick you see them as capable of, and yet somehow they seem restrained by a gesture toward earnestness.

As all modern students of “The Tempest” know, it’s Caliban who holds the key to the play’s morality. The more sympathetic he is the less so is his master, and in the modern world, the more identifiable he is with the victims of imperialist colonialism, the more sympathetic he becomes. Beninean actor, Djimon Hounso goes the sympathy route, but his performance is far from uncomplicated. Certainly, he enacts the Western idea of the exotic other, savage, in touch with nature but awed and baffled by technology (here, magic), not quite trust-worthy but overly put-upon. Mirren’s Prospera wants to see him as a pure and dangerous villain and yet is clearly unsettled by the tyranny he provokes in her.

Taymor writes further complications on her Caliban’s skin. It is striped with stings and with whip lashes, the unambiguously evil marks of the slave master.  It is African black with large patches of pale, almost albino white. These patches remind one of lentigo, raising the idea that Caliban’s European whiteness as a kind of disease or condition. Upon closer inspection though it’s not just his skin, you can see that the white side of Caliban’s face surrounds a blue eye in contrast to the brown one on the other side, echoing Prospera’s description of his mother as a “blue-eyed hag.”

Ben Whisaw, as Caliban’s counterpart, Ariel, is the film’s one casualty to special effects. He is played as not merely androgynous, with strategically crossed legs, a blurred midsection, male facial features and the occasional appearance of slight breasts, but as a cipher, flickering translucently or appearing in pool of water, distinctly inhuman and almost neutral in expression and desire. Some of the Ariel effects are quite cool. He’s great divided into tiny particles or taking the form of a vengeful harpy. At other times though, he comes off as a bit camp, a bit Doctor Who, flying halteringly through the air with his shimmering blue bottom.

Plotwise, the greatest challenge of the “The Tempest” is it’s apparent lack of conflict. Prospero (or Prospera) always has the situation firmly in hand. Nothing ever really threatens this peerless protagonist so there can be little tension. In this production, Taymor and Mirren make it clear that the conflict is internal. After years of nursing resentment and loss, Prospera has her charges and her enemies right where she wants them. The question is, what should she do with them?

I found this to be a revelation, and it helped me answer one of the questions I inevitably ask myself upon the immerging of a new Shakespeare movie: Am I ok with this film being shown in high school and even college English classrooms, as it inevitable will be?  My answer here is “yes.” You get the story, you get the language, you get the characters, the conflicts, you even get the jokes.

The secondly question I ask myself is: Does this feel like definitive film version of this play for this generation?” My answer here is “no.” I want an equally accessible  “Tempest” with more filmic choices, and frankly, as wonderful as Mirren’s performance is, with a male Prospero. In fact, having seen and for the most part enjoyed this film, I feel twice as eager for the next version to emerge.

Most scholars peg the Bard’s birthday at April 23, but then again depending on who you read, he was a team, an earl, a glover’s son, a queen or Bacon.

All in all, let’s forgive Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project for celebrating the (probably) 456th birthday of The Artist Formerly Known As Shakespeare (or Shakespear, or Shagspere or Shaxberd) this Saturday in Cambridge. Commencing at 3 p.m., the Shakespearean shindig is conveniently located at John Harvard’s Brew House, so you can drink deep while you geek hard.

Other friends of the Bard on hand will include Orfeo Group, the Revels, Mass Mouth and Improv Boston. Groundlings can expect some performances form these groups, There will be a Shakespeare SLAM—an open mike for monologuers and sonneteers—a community reading of the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet."

An A.S.P. press release further reports that "The Harvard Square Business Association and the Mayor of Cambridge will also be on hand to read the City Council resolution for the day."

The groups had originally planned a parade across the city, but alas, "The rain, it raineth every day" (and weather forecasts have convinced them to keep things indoors).

Rain or shine, it should be a good day for cakes and ale—and ham.

The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love. It is widely considered to be one of William Shakespeare’s most obscure works.

The Phoenix and the Turtle

Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever’s end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather’d king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice-white
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender makest
With the breath thou givest and takest,
‘Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead:
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
‘Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’ sight;
Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded,
That it cried, ‘How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain.’
Whereupon it made this throne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.