Pros: Striking settings, costumes, and make-up. Strong performances by Jessica Lange, Harry Lennix, Alan Cumming.
Cons: A bleak, nearly hopeless view of mankind and its future.
The Bottom Line: TITUS: An imaginative interpretation of one of Shakespeare's least known plays, but some of its many innovations don't work, and some of its scenes will revolt even strong stomachs.
Looking over Epinions on TITUS (1999), I was surprised that a solid majority liked it. Hot Broadway Director (The Lion King) Julie Taymor's debut film of Shakespeare's earliest known, least produced play, Titus Andronicus (1593), is a harlequin presentation more outrageous than anything yet done to Shakespeare in Cinema.
Aside from the fact the Bard provided the scenario, why should anyone like it?
The film, as the play, is one long series of internecine conflicts, beginning with ritual slaughter and ending with cannibalism; rape, orgies and assassination occur in between. It is, true, much like behavior we see around the World today.
The film is strikingly staged and photographed. The rather journeyman dialogue of Shakespeare is judiciously, for the most part, sacrificed to swift, brutal action. And, I repeat, there is a lot of graphic lechery, torture, murder, and bestiality.
Might that be a factor in the film's acceptance?
For many, separated from "the curse" of Shakespeare, in the hands of a James Cameron or a Roland Emmerich, TITUS might have served as a blockbuster movie, appealing to the young, who, if they turn on TV or go down to the Mall, may ingest the same intimations of Chaos, just around the cyber-corner.
Actually, as many of you will know, Shakespeare was considered no genius for the first hundred years after his death. Samuel Johnson and others began to write him up, and by the end of the 19th Century, the famous Victorian actor-managers were spreading across the English-speaking world, and to places like Germany, conventional stagings which established Shakespeare's rightful reputation: The finest dramatic poet in any language and the man, according to Harold Bloom lately, who gave Westerners a sense of what it is to be Human. These productions also reinforced the useful notion among class-ridden populations that, while it was better not to, Royalty, like you and me occasionally, would like to genteelly slaughter, roast or devour each other's young.
Modern World War and Revolution sardonically expanded that view, and the style of Shakespearean production.
The 20th Century, then, saw the rise of innovative Shakespearean adaptation, shifting locale, time, imagining new business. Most notable of these adaptations was Orson Welles' Black Macbeth, set in 19th Century Haiti, and his 1937 Julius Caesar, which looked suspiciously like the Nazi Nuremberg Rallies of the newsreels in that year. Similar variations of Shakespeare in the movies took a long time to catch up, but the last few years have seen Ian McKellan's "British Fascist" RICHARD III (1995), a modern teenagers' ROMEO AND JULIET (Luhrmann, 1996), and a "dancing into World War II" LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST (2000) by Kenneth Branagh.
What for me was the most interesting feature in TITUS -- and what I think might have attracted Welles -- was the envelop device Writer/Director Taymor adds.
TITUS begins with a gliding overhead shot of a young boy sitting in the family kitchen. We are obviously in the present, and the home is presents a typical setting and situation created by Modern Western Commercial Society, in which both the boy's parents are out working to pay for all the gadgets, or perhaps playing by themselves, elsewhere. An afternoon meal has been left for the unhappy, frustrated latchkey kid. He begins to engage his favorite toy soldier in a furious food fight with his jello and sandwiches.
Suddenly, we enter a boy's fantasy of ancient Rome.
Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins), a Roman Commander in the Maximus mode, is returning in triumph from wars against the Barbarians. In tow are the captive Gothic Queen, Tamora (Jessica Lange) and her family, whom he intends to punish for the death of one of his sons.
[Hopkins delivers his recent flinty performance, competent enough to carry this difficult film, but somehow not so inspired as in the past. Jessica Lange, on the other hand, continues to astonish. She is shuffled in, chained, blued and tattooed, full of street-punk disdain and motherly anxiety. She goes chin to chin with her renowned British colleagues, never giving ground, and Jessica Lange, apparently fully nude, in a sex scene at age 50 is something to see!]
The opening, and the entire film, is a messy child's mixture of disparate elements, like meat and dessert. Legionaires, short swords unsheathed, march into a Capital which may as well be Tampa, Florida (where, indeed, part of TITUS was shot), and a motorcycle corps does wheelies and circles around the phalanxes. Caesar is dead, and a modern style political rally, with microphones and podiums, displays the contending factions for the succession. Anachronisticly but somehow fittingly, the factions wave for their choices bright pennants of modern rival Italian soccer teams.
Titus, representing the stability of the past, is offered the wreath of Supreme Leader, but he refuses, eaten up by his more immediate desire to revenge his own dead offspring. After he has had one of Tamora's sons, Alarbus (Raz Degan), fiendishly executed, she and her remaining two sons are put under the protection of the new Emperor Saturninus (Alan Cumming), who is very mod and affects a peekaboo fall of hair over one eye.
Tamora, aching with revenge of her own, seduces and marries Saturninus. She presently has an affair with the Moorish Aaron (Harry J. Lennix), which produces a child, and becomes an agent to assist her sons in raping and cutting off the hands of Livinia (Laura Fraser), daughter of Titus. He, in turn --
All the while, our modern youngster (Osheen Jones) watches furtively from the shadows, and from behind pillars.
Welles would have liked the concept. The boy is incorporating in his fantasy all the exciting mixed messages of Human Being's brutality, indifference, and lack of forgiveness toward one another -- from a family table to the sports stadium to the battlefield. Welles, however, would have faulted the film, I think, in all its interesting juxtapositions, for holding out scarcely a butterfly of hope.
Because I agree with that perception, I narrowly approve of TITUS, but I cannot recommend it to friends. It is another film which, paradoxically, may be a trifle warmer and more engrossing on a video screen.
Titus Andronicus, like all Shakespeare's Tragedies, is what the Elizabethans called "A Tragedy of Blood." They were fascinated, as should be we, why "civilized" groups of humans, from families to great empires, should become embroiled in endless rounds of revengeful slaughter and mutilation, until, for short periods of time, they fall quiet in exhaustion.
It is, of course, just by coincidence that besides Rome and Tampa, TITUS used Croatia for some of its locations.
Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange ignite the screen in a strikingly original coup de cinema (New York Times). Titus is a wild ri...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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