Directed by Julie Taymor Written by William Shakespeare, adapted by Julie Taymor Starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming and Harry Lennix Classification: R Rating: ***½
We like our Shakespeare in the image of our peaceful times: Hesitant Hamlet, the callow Romeo and Juliet, or the magician Prospero are more appealing than the gore-splattered kings of the other plays. Now comes Julie Taymor's film Titus, adapted from Titus Andronicus, the most hideous of Shakespeare's plays, with its scenes of murder, rape and even cannibalism.
Taymor, celebrated for her adaptation to the stage of Disney's The Lion King, has turned Titus into visionary Grand Guignol, distilling the play to a chain of hallucinatory, spectacular scenes. True to its source, Titus is exhilaratingly nasty down to the meat, gristle and bone.
Lauded for her internationalist, magpie approach to theatre (sculpture, masks and puppetry), in her debut film Taymor uses her production skills to create an eclectically evil world, part fifth-century Roman barbaric, part last-century totalitarian. Dictators and senators, breastplates and bullets, Mussolini's Fascist government centre and Roman arches blend into one jumbled brutal whole.
The sensational production design isn't all Titus has going for it. There is a kind of commentary here, though not of the CNN variety. The film is about what could be called the inner fascist in each of us. It begins from the viewpoint of a child, a not-so-innocent 10-year-old boy looking through the eye holes of a paper-bag helmet, as he plays with toy soldiers on a kitchen table. In a frenzy, he knocks the soldiers over and plasters them with ketchup. Suddenly the kitchen wall implodes, a giant figure takes the boy under his arm and leaps into darkness.
The play proper begins in Rome's Coliseum, centre-stage in the theatre of cruelty, in the dead of night. From the shadows, in crabwise steps like advancing samurai swordswmen, come the Roman soldiers. On their shoulders they bear bandaged mummies, representing their dead and wounded. The ranks part to reveal a bald-as-a-cueball Anthony Hopkins, caked in blue clay, making the first speech, as the rueful general Titus returning from bloody victory over the Goths. The boy remains an observer, watching on the steps of the capital, in the modern-ancient Rome, peeking around pillars, and then eventually becoming absorbed as a character into the drama.
Only the tendons of the drama's plot remain genuinely archaic. The subject of the play is the defilement of Rome, when Titus returns as the conquering hero but makes a couple of critical errors. First, he ignores the entreaties for mercy of the Goth queen Tamora (Jessica Lange) and has her son sacrificed to please the gods. Then he refuses to assume his proper role as emperor of Rome, leaving that position to the debauched, power-hungry Saturninus (Alan Cumming). Then, unexpectedly, after being rejected by Titus's daughter, Lavinia, Saturninus weds the barbarian queen.
Tamora exacts a systematic vengeance, which reaches its culmination when she sends her sons to rape Lavinia, the symbolic embodiment of Rome. They also cut off her tongue and remove her hands so she cannot reveal her attackers. Though the assault takes place off-screen, the discovery of Lavinia by her uncle (Colm Feore), standing like a statue on a forest stump, remains the movie's most nightmarish and eerily beautiful scene. Dragged past despair into madness, Titus begins to plot his revenge.
Along with everything else, the acting styles here clash, though the dissonance serves the drama's bellicose theme. Lange, Wagnerian in a gold breastplate and braided hair, makes up in presence what she lacks in Shakespearean diction. Harry Lennix, as the Moor prisoner and secret lover of Tamora, is a good naturalistic actor. Cumming plays Saturninus as if he were still doing his Tony Award-winning performance in Cabaret, a mad young Weimar fop ready to turn into a Hitler. Above them all, Hopkins, leonine and steely-eyed, rages and roars grandly.
The only question mark lies over the head of the famous, long-dead screenwriter. What, after the shocking turns and dreadful images, are we to make of Titus Andronicus? This is early Shakespeare, and you can recognize the prototypes of other great characters from Lady Macbeth to Iago to Lear. Yet the play's banquet scene seems little more than a rude punchline. The sight of Hopkins prancing about in a chef's outfit, or the allusions to The Silence of the Lambs, don't help us take it more seriously. Perhaps they'll be the hook for another kind of young audience for Shakespeare, grown tired of the romantic adaptations. Move over Blair Witch Project and Marilyn Manson -- there's a new kid in town called Shakespeare. He's been dead a long time but he's still really scary. Titus opens in theatres in Toronto and Vancouver today. Openings in other Canadian centres should be announced next month.
Liam Lacey