TITUS
STARRING: Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Colm Feore, Harry J. Lennix, Angus MacFadyen, Matthew Rhys, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers DIRECTOR: Julie Taymor WRITTEN BY: Julie Taymor, William Shakespeare (play "Titus Andronicus")
If Tales From The Crypt had been around in the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus would have made a perfect episode. One of the Bard's earliest and least-known plays (written in his formative stage before 1599), it's a nasty little tale of betrayal, murder, and revenge that still packs a shock-value wallop. In bringing her stage adaptation to the screen, theater director Taymor (best known for her Broadway version of Disney's The Lion King) admirably doesn't shy away from these lurid elements. In attempting to tinker with the original play's ancient Roman setting, however, she has created a film that is at once mesmerizing and preposterous, fascinating but ultimately frustrating.
The story centers around Titus Andronicus (Hopkins), a victorious general who returns to Rome with several prisoners in tow. These include Tamora (Lange), the vengeful Queen of the Goths, her three sons, and her lover, a dark-skinned Moor named Aaron (Lennix). All of these captives will eventually spell disaster for Titus and his family. In a typically Shakespearean turn of events, Tamora ends up marrying the newly crowned Emperor Saturninus (Cumming), and promptly proceeds to take revenge on Titus for killing her firstborn son as a sacrifice. By the time Tamora and Aaron are through, three of Titus' sons are dead, another banished from Rome, and his daughter subjected to particularly gruesome atrocities. Naturally, Titus is devastated to the point of insanity, but he keeps it together long enough to cook up a revenge scheme that would make the Crypt Keeper proud.
In terms of interpretation, Taymor's adaptation is brilliant. She stages scenes with a mastery that truly brings the play to life, and she gets performances that are solid all around. As the duty-bound Titus, Hopkins plumbs depths of despair and madness with riveting presence. As the irredeemably evil Aaron, Lennix skillfully avoids caricature, and Cumming makes a memorably snide and capricious Saturninus. Lange, in her first Shakespeare role, gives Tamora the benefit of her age. In bed with Saturninus and her sons, the Goth Queen radiates an almost incestuous sexuality. Despite the occasional accent slip, Lange holds her own against Hopkins and the rest of the exceptional cast.
Unfortunately, Taymor can't resist the urge to customize the play's original setting. While she isn't the first director to try it (see A Midsummer Night's Dream), she does such a poor job that it nearly torpedoes the entire film. She seems to be striving for the sort of uniquely indeterminate time frame that Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) does so well, but too much of the production design is merely clumsy anachronism. Every time the story threatens to become totally engrossing, a motorbike or an arcade videogame or a shotgun will suddenly appear as an irritating distraction. Worse yet, the character of Young Lucius (Titus' grandson) acts as a surrogate audience throughout the film, undermining the effectiveness of nearly every scene he's in.
While these touches are more artifice than art, they thankfully don't outweigh the film's merits. Titus is worth seeing for the performances, and for Taymor's confident interpretation of the dialogue. Besides, as the Crypt Keeper would say, "there's plenty of meat to the story, boils and ghouls." Heh heh.
GRADE: **1/2
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