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In his films, director Paul Mazursky enjoys poking fun at human frailties and foibles, yet is "preoccupied by the themes of change and redemption" (Siegel 68). In the tradition of classical Hollywood, Mazursky enjoys putting characters through complex and tormented dramatic situations, but usually prefers happy endings. Characteristic in that regard is the 1982 film Tempest, a motion picture so central to Mazursky's work that he titled his 1999 memoir Show Me the Magic, reflecting the best-known line spoken by Phillip Dimitrios, the architect character who takes the Prospero role in Mazursky's modern adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Yet most critics of the time of Tempest's release regarded Mazursky's film as problematic and unsuccessful. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, for example, summed up an unfavorable assessment of the film by saying, "This is an absurd movie, but what an artifact! It takes a high degree of civilization to produce something so hollow" ( 128). Similarly, Gary Arnold of The Washington Post denounced Tempest as an "enfeebled, dithering variation on Shakespeare's "The Tempest'" and suggested that "Despite the title and the storm scene, a more appropriate title might be Teapot'" (C3).
In his memoir, Mazursky acknowledges how hurt he was at the critical response to Tempest: "[Mjany of the reviews were vicious. Who did Paul Mazursky think he was to take on William Shakespeare? I was devastated" (Mazursky 121). Even those critics who have defended Mazursky's Tempest as a treatment of the Shakespeare play have had to acknowledge contradictions and discontinuities in the film. Douglas Bruster, for example, says, "Shakespeare's Tempest resists Mazursky's translation, and it is in this resolution that much of the film's value lies" (28).
Indeed, Tempest has more to offer than most critics of its time gave it credit for; and both the virtues and the problems of Tempest stem from a discontinuity between William Shakespeare's ambiguous, unstable tragicomedy on the one hand and Mazursky's fundamentally comic and optimistic worldview on the other. Nonetheless, the film is important as a turning point for Mazursky; for in Tempest, he stopped restricting himself to American characters and situations and began exploring the interaction between American culture and other cultures of the world-a creative decision that ultimately led to some of his most...