TITUS (Fox Searchlight) Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Angus Macfayden, Laura Fraser, Colm Feore, Harry Lennix, Matthew Rhys, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, James Frain, Osheen Jones. Screenplay: Julie Taymor, based on TITUS ANDRONICUS by William Shakespeare. Producers: Conchita Airoldi, Julie Taymor and Jody Patton. Director: Julie Taymor. MPAA Rating: R (violence, sexual situations, nudity, adult themes) Running Time: 162 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I'm not saying that there's absolutely nothing Julie Taymor isn't willing to try in her feature film debut TITUS, but at some point during the production I'm fairly certain I saw a kitchen sink fly through the frame. It came somewhere between the Roman soldiers marching in traditional costume and political rivals riding in motorcades, between the swing band playing at an emperor's wedding feast and the swing of a camera around a freeze-frame tableau of death a la THE MATRIX. There's no telling from one minute to the next where or when we are, or what cinematic device will make a cameo appearance. Virtually from the first frame, TITUS unfolds as over two and a half hours of blood, bombast and auteurial audacity.
I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why TITUS actually left me marginally impressed instead of bored by the director's "hey, check out what I can do" style. Sure, it's Shakespeare; it's also the play T. S. Eliot called "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written." The main narrative follows the tragedies that befall a successful Roman general named Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins) after his return from a campaign against the Goths. Though the people want Titus to become emperor after the death of the latest Caesar, the warrior instead supports the late emperor's eldest son Saturninus (Alan Cumming). Big mistake. Soon Saturninus is married to Tamora (Jessica Lange), a Goth queen with a grudge against Titus, and Titus' family begins meeting with cruel fates -- many of them orchestrated by Tamora's Moorish lover Aaron (Harry Lennix).
TITUS' odd prologue finds a young boy (Osheen Jones) in a contemporary kitchen playing violently with his toys before being spirited away to the locations of the play. Initially, I suspected that Taymor was preparing to put together an attack on the glorification and sanitization of violence, with the boy as silent observer to the story's many murders, sacrifices, dismemberments and throat-slashings. Indeed, the acts of violence and vengeance are many and frequent, but the sub-text of the boy as observer eventually vanishes as he is abruptly absorbed into the narrative as Titus' grandson. Without a sense that there's some sort of cultural lesson to be taken away from the gruesome events, they simply become gruesome events. I'd never read TITUS ANDRONICUS nor seen any production before this one, and I can't say I'm terribly eager to see it again. T. S. Eliot wasn't being very hyperbolic in his assessment.
Yet while TITUS is far from a gripping story, it's still a pretty decent piece of theater. Taymor's roots are on Broadway (she directed the stage production of THE LION KING), but that doesn't mean she can't make use of a camera. At times, TITUS almost seems to be the work of a director who isn't sure if she'll ever get the chance to make a film again, so she leaves everything she's got on the screen. There are a couple of shots that ended up lodged in my head -- a horrifying vision of Titus' daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser) discovered by Titus' brother Marcus (Colm Feore) after she has been raped and mutilated, and a truck carrying some grisly artifacts of the Andronici's conflict with the emperor. Dante Ferretti's production design and Elliot Goldenthal's score must have driven each man mad, so many variations does Taymor ask of them. It's hard to imagine so grim a tale given more energy through sheer force of a director's imagination.
It would be a cruel misuse of the word "entertaining" to say that TITUS qualifies. It's well-acted enough -- Cumming in particular is a delight as the foppish Saturninus -- but not a showcase for master thespianism. In fact, Anthony Hopkins' best moment may be a ghoulish reference to his renown as cinema's most famous cannibal. I didn't enjoy all that much of TITUS, but I found myself admiring Taymor's choices even when I didn't understand them, or even agree with them. Simply put, TITUS is a display of film-making nerve -- the spectacle of a novice movie director deciding to pick Shakespeare for her first work, and one of Shakespeare's least respected works at that, then molding it into something consistently watchable. Taymor gets her hands dirty the hard way ... and, fortunately for her, there's a kitchen sink lying around to wash them in.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 severence packages: 6.
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