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to lose their meaning entirely, turning the pages upon pages of iambic pentameter into a tired, monotonous exercise in outdated grammar.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.
_____________________________ Sean Molloy // Media Junkies http://www.mediajunkies.com E-mail: sean@mediajunkies.com
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