Titus Review
by "Sean P. Molloy" (spmolloy AT todhf DOT com)March 23rd, 2000
Titus (*** out of ****)
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Colm Feore Directed By Julie Taymor
Fox Searchlight Pictures, Rated R, 1999
Running Time: 2 Hours 42 Minutes
By Sean Molloy
[LIGHT SPOILERS]
Shakespeare In Hate
I really wanted to love this movie. From the moment I saw Titus' preview, with its outlandish costumes and otherworldly combination of motorcycles, cold corporate concrete structures and Roman centurions bearing mud-encrusted swords, it shot to the top of my very short "man, I gotta see that" list. I had never read the play on which it was based, but I had some basic info on what it was all about... it was Shakespeare's first play, and easily his most violent; it's also generally considered to be his worst. I was under the impression that Titus Andronicus was a wild, intentionally over-the-top Shakespearean B-movie, and I walked into Julie Taymor's film adaptation expecting the same - a vivid, ironic celebration of violence and gore. But it turns out that there's just too much tragedy in Titus' tale to for it to be any fun.
From a visual standpoint, Titus delivers everything I was hoping for, and then some. First-time director Julie Taymor has taken Shakespeare's words verbatim, but she went to the same revisionist staging school as Baz Luhrmann (the man responsible for the DiCaprio-laced Romeo & Juliet) and Richard Loncraine (who gave us Ian McKellan's fascist retelling of Richard III.). Titus exists in a wonderful and completely timeless period that evokes Nazi Germany, Jules Verne, Ancient Rome, Elliot Ness, and Pink Floyd's The Wall all at once. Taymor's Broadway heritage as the director of the critically acclaimed production of The Lion King shows clearly here in the fantastic makeup and costumes. On more than one occasion we see a man wearing a tiger-shaped headdress, or a woman that has an animal head grafted on to the top of her own. There are things paraded on the screen that I can honestly say I've never seen before... the plight of Titus' daughter Lavonia, for example, is what you stumble upon in your most appalling nightmares.
Shakespearean acting for a modern filmgoing (read: non-Olde-English-speaking) audience presents its own set of difficulties. When you're sitting in high school English class taking turns reading Hamlet out loud, the kid three rows down from you doesn't know whether to inject bitter sarcastic irony or sincere quiet remorse into Polonius' next rhyming couplet. In that kind of setting, it's pretty easy for the words to lose their meaning entirely, turning the pages upon pages of iambic pentameter into a tired, monotonous exercise in outdated grammar.
Since I don't have any other criteria to judge such an unfamiliar acting style, all I can really do is ask myself if I understood what a character was saying even if I didn't fully grasp all the words. If there's one thing I've learned from reading Shakespeare's stuff, it's that the delivery is as much a part of the meaning as the words themselves. So using the Uncertified Sean Scale of Shakespearean Performance: the acting in Titus rates as truly exceptional all across the board. Veteran Anthony Hopkins leads the pack as the title character; Jessica Lange plays Tamora, Queen of the Goths, with vicious cunning, while Alan Cumming struts and frets upon the stage as the whiny, manipulative newly-crowned Emperor Saturninus as if he's loving every minute of it. And, to be fair, Taymor's pacing and visual decisions are equally responsible for Titus' success in the clarity-for-us-common-folk department.
So what, then, holds Titus back from greatness? With so much in place that's so wonderfully right, what exactly went wrong? Well, here's something you don't hear a lot when it comes to a Shakespeare adaptation: all of Titus' problems come straight from the source.
Before I get into this, let me tell you that I feel woefully under-qualified to criticize Shakespeare... my experience boils down to reading a couple plays in high school and watching a couple movie adaptations in college. After leaving this particular film, I figured that anything that didn't quite jive in my head was just a result of my untrained ear missing the Bard's point. But poking around a bit afterward, I soon discovered that Titus' flaws are almost universally agreed upon by Shakespeare's critics - some go so far as to say that the play is so bad, it's probably not even Shakespeare's to begin with. So armed with that knowledge, I feel confident enough to point out what I myself found wrong with Titus Andronicus...
The biggest issue lies mainly with the principal villain, Aaron - an orchestrator of evil for evil's sake. The point of the play seems to be that a single act of violence can beget a chain reaction, until everyone involved lives only to exact vengeance before someone in the other party can do it first... a point that could have been more effective without Aaron's unmotivated designs. Don't get me wrong, he's exquisitely played (here by Harry Lennix), it's the way he's written that's the problem.
Even Titus himself is an uneven character - at one turn he is a duty-bound soldier, loyal to Rome despite all the wrong that the City does to him. He backs an Emperor that he couldn't possibly like time and time again, even when it hurts his family and friends, and his early motivations are difficult to sympathize with. He does something horrible early on to one of his sons that dulls the edge of what sorrow and hatred he's supposed to feel later. Sometimes Titus seems absolutely crazy (shooting arrows into the sky bearing messages to the gods), and the next he seems extraordinarily clever (the revenge he stages in the end), but all his plans and inspirations are pretty much random in the end... A credit to Hopkins that he seems to understand Titus as much as he could possibly be understood. Some critics argue that Titus Andronicus is supposed to be a black comedy (like I was hoping to find) rather than a tragedy (it isn't quite that either), but if that's the case, I didn't find a whole lot to laugh at.
Could Taymor have "fixed" some of these problems? Certainly. A better question is should she have? Perhaps an even better question is did she even want to? What adjustments she tries to make are purely theatrical ones, and while they mostly hit the mark, sometimes they don't quite seem to work... the film opens with a scene showing a modern child playing violently with a pile of action figures and war toys in his kitchen. The kid sticks around for the remainder of the film, first as a silent witness; but then he gradually (and seamlessly) becomes an active participant in the horrid affair as one of Titus' grandsons. Is Taymor just pointing out that violence has always been around? Is she saying it's better to take out our frustrations on toys and by beating the crap out of each other in Mortal Kombat 5? I'm not sure... maybe it's a little of both.
Julie Taymor has done her beautiful best, and she's taken a great risk (especially for a first-timer) to attempt to breathe life into a lifeless play. And the end result is something alive and original and refreshing; so much so that it's honestly frustrating that Titus Andronicus isn't a better tale. The film never drags or has a moment that feels like dead weight, even though Titus clocks in at nearly three hours. Taymor and her devoted crew have left Shakespeare's words untouched, and built upon them a lavish vision deserving of a better foundation. Like Titus himself, they're loyal to a cause that simply doesn't deserve their devotion.
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Sean Molloy // Media Junkies
http://www.mediajunkies.com
E-mail: [email protected]
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