Screen

...Other images also work nicely...

...Ferdinand, sorely tested by Prospero with manual labor, collapses and is comforted by Miranda on a dimly lit staircase that is both forbidding and yet somehow romantic, and which perfectly conveys both present distress and future bliss...

...The scenes that set up this premise in the first twenty minutes are the best in the movie...

...Embedded in bark, moss grows out of Ariel's mouth...

...Wisely coasting on his small but undeniable flair for Felliniesque imagery and, even more wisely, hiring Sir John Gielgud to play Prospero, Greenaway has managed to give us a Tempest that renders about one-tenth of the magic of this great fantasy...

...Spielberg and his writers add some maudlin stuff about fatherhood and maturity ("to live will be a terribly big adventure"), but there is nothing fresh in the reversals and elaborations, no indication that Spielberg absolutely had to make this movie...

...The picture is startling, horrible, and comic all at once...

...Darling's penitential consignment of himself to the kennel) and in the mythic resonance of the story...

...Almost nothing in Hook bores because Spielberg keeps throwing stuff at us, but almost nothing he throws is truly engrossing...

...The ninety-year-old Wendy, upon learning of her former playmate's Wall Street aggressiveness, tartly observes, "Why, Peter, you've become a pirate...

...The sets—pirate ship, island, lagoon—are enormous but much of the action on them is stale and tinny, and the gags performed on them are worthy of only a lesser installment of the old "Carol Burnett Show...

...In this Tempest, an unkillable poet and a stalwart theater knight have bailed out Peter Greenaway's very shallow and very leaky little craft...

...The crocodile has been stuffed but still manages to swallow Hook...

...For it is the conceit of this film that Peter Pan, during one of his periodic visits to the aging Wendy, finally fell in love with Wendy's granddaughter, forsook his eternal youth, married, bred, and became a corporate raiding lawyer...

...As any good illustration in a book does, Greenaway's better images freeze the characters and plot in midflight and let you savor that moment of transfixion...

...Even Robin Williams's occasionally funny Pan is 26: 31 January 1992 Commonweal mostly a rehash of some of his past performances...

...Thus, Greenaway suspends a colloquy between Ariel and Prospero to give us a flashback in which we see what Ariel looked like when the spirit was literally treed by Caliban's witch-mama Sycorax...

...And all the scenes that Shakespeare Commonweal 31 January 1992: 25 himself intended as sheer spectacle and music—the betrothal celebration, the harpy descending upon the usurpers' dinner— Greenaway mounts skillfully, if excessively, with his celebrated lateral tracking shots, rock-ized Renaissance music, and an abundance of nude bodies painted gold, writhing beside other figures clothed in outré variations on Jacobean garb...

...But there are no video games in the Never Land, no shopping malls, and though there are a few skateboards, it's not as much fun riding one through forests as it is to hurtle through urban crowds...

...In other words, Greenaway the image maestro gets going only when Shakespeare the word maestro pauses...

...This movie was obviously very carefully planned, but I don't think it was envisioned...

...The most egregious one posits Prospero as planning his revenge on paper in the form of a verse play that just happens to be called The Tempest...

...Greenaway, of course, undermines the story with numerous tricks, narrative and visual, none of which serve to shed light on the play...

...Not even vocally...

...This sprite, born to be as quick as thought and as impalpable as light, is rotting away within nature...

...Hook and Smee still have their duets of hate/love but the exchanges lack the original's strangely masochistic humor (despite the good efforts of Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins...

...Or when John Gielgud is serving the word maestro...

...Gielgud as Prosperosi...

...Considering what atrocities Greenaway has flung onto screens (the loathsome The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, the mincingly sadistic and finally incoherent The Draughtsman's Contract), we should be grateful for even this small measure...

...Several of Greenaway's images are memorable not as dramatic propulsions of the story (as Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's are for their versions of Henry V) but as static illustrations of the text...

...Sir James Barrie conceived of the Never Land as a truly wondrous place where British children of the Edwardian era could remain children, where irresponsibility and spontaneity could be preserved and not perish in the service of king and country or business and family, and where the only empire to be fought for was a "nicely crammed" island with lagoons and tree houses and pirates and Indians...

...Its unforced magic made me feel that, for once, Spielberg should have been content with the role of adaptor rather than inventor, and that he could have made a super version of the original Peter Pan instead of this halfbaked sequel...

...In the middle of Hook there is a brief flashback to Pan's babyhood and the beginning of his magical career...

...SCREEN FANTASIES & GIMMICKS 'PROSPERO' & 'HOOK' Peter Greenaway, a self-preening postmodernist who couldn't articulate the simplest story to save his life, has made an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest called Prospero's Books...

...Then Peter flies to the Never Land and...well, the movie doesn't exactly crash but it certainly stalls, gets going again, stalls again, flips over, rises rapidly in altitude, sinks sickeningly, and so on...

...But this Prospero-Shakespeare reads his play-inprogress on the soundtrack with Gielgud speaking the lines of all the characters, not just Prospero's, while various actors and dancers dumbshow their roles on camera...

...Spielberg teases us with our memories of the book, the plays, and the movies...

...The various fights only rehash and diminish the stunts from an Indiana Jones adventure and the special effects wanly recall E.T.'s...

...The adult Pan is afraid of flying, even on airplanes...

...Spielberg proves incapable of adding to these inventions, much less outdoing them...

...This is a raptly beautiful episode, reminiscent of Arthur Rackham's drawings but not at all static in execution...

...Gielgud as Miranda—no...

...That's not the only gratitude that's in order...

...Tinker Bell still hovers about but Spielberg feels obliged to hold his camera on Julia Roberts's face long enough for her to register her usual self-adoring smiles...

...The endurance of Barrie's play and novel, despite their self-caressing twee-ness, lies precisely in Barrie's exuberant inventions (Hook's paranoia about the crocodile, the crock's ingested clock, Mr...

...But in Hook, Steven Spielberg's sequel to Peter Pan, the children are Americanized and are precociously hip as most American kids are...

...It seems Dad Pan has been missing too many Little League games...

...As I have said, Gielgud has too much to read on the soundtrack, but when he is on camera as Prospero, one cannot get too much of him...

...The famous voice hasn't been thickened or clouded by age (though Gielgud is eighty-six), and its owner's command of legato seems to lodge Shakespeare's words in our brains with the speed and happy insidiousness of mental telepathy...

...And since the mime is boringly, confusingly choreographed (with many actors masked so that we can't even see their lips move), and since Sir John only slightly alters his familiar tenor cum tremolo voice to suit the other roles, even moviegoers fairly familiar with the text will have trouble distinguishing who is saying what to whom...

...This makes Prospero a stand-in for Shakespeare and that's okay by me since Prospero is considered by many critics to be the Bard's most substantially autobiographical portrait...

...They fill us with the happiness children feel on Christmas Eve: all joy is impending, all expectation delicious...

...He can only reminisce and parody...

...Gielgud's Prospero is the one and only Prospero of our age, and we must feel gratitude to Greenaway for preserving some pieces of it...

...The London that Spielberg has reconstructed looks as if it will revert to the Edwardian era at any moment, and the sky over it positively begs for flying children...

...And what an inflection the grand Maggie Smith brings to that line...

...Only after Captain Hook kidnaps his two children does this middle-aged Pan revert to his swashbuckling self and, even then, it's primarily to win back the admiration of his disaffected son and prove that he's not a workaholic zombie...

...The Darling house in which Wendy still lives really looks like a repository of wonderful memories, and Caroline Goodall as Peter's wife really seems to carry the Wendy genes...

...They are Lost Boys, indeed, dependent upon each other for entertainment and waiting for Peter Pan to return...

...One can picture these Lost Boys back in the States: skateboarding, plugging away at video games, cruising shopping malls...

...Greenaway had the good sense to cut out the pyrotechnics during Prospero's oratorio-like monologues and keep the camera trained on his great star's face, which seems so irradiated by the words spoken that it shines with a proud, humorous mastery...

...RICHARD ALLEVA Commonweal 31 January 1992: 27...

...So, since these American kids on Spielberg's island aren't escaping Latin conjugations and canings in strict public schools but are rather being deprived of MTV, Walkman headphones, and pizza pie, they seem as underprivileged as children stuck in a summer camp long after the summer has ended...