Titus Andronicus may read a bit like a Shakespearian installment in the Saw series, but in her adaptation of the play, Julie Taymor manages to find the beauty in the story and bring out the complexity in even the most evil of characters. Watching the cold-hearted Titus soften through love for his mutilated daughter and seeing Aaron's pride at the birth of his (illegitimate) son, and the film becomes as much about the ties between parents and their children as it is about avenging the wrongs done to them. Although it is also about avenging them. Avenging them in the most horrific, gruesome ways imaginable. And that's what makes it fun.
From Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer:
Julie Taymor's Titus , based on the play Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare, would strike the more learned admirers of the Bard as a curious, almost incomprehensible choice from his oeuvre for a movie in any other times but our own. Consider the most grotesquely gruesome entrance in all dramatic literature, "Enter the Emperor's sons, Demetrius and Chiron, with Lavinia, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished." Poor Lavinia! But fear not. Shakespeare will serve up the infamous rapists and mutilators, Demetrius and Chiron, three acts later to their own mother Tamora, formerly captive Queen of the Goths, and now Empress of Rome. As a culinary delicacy. And who is the master chef on this occasion? Why, none other than Titus Andronicus himself, father of the ravaged Lavinia, and a kind of Roman Hannibal Lecter, who is played, appropriately enough, by Anthony Hopkins, an actor adept at both Shakespearean blank verse and Oscar-winning cannibalism.
This Marlovian parody, much stronger in revenge rhetoric than in the dramatic development of its characters, has been castigated by no less a cultural authority than Harold Bloom with his summary judgment that "though there is a nasty power evident throughout the text, I can concede no intrinsic value to Titus Andronicus ."
Ms. Taymor obviously thought otherwise and summoned all her wizardry with mise en scène on display on the stage in her triumphant The Lion King . Some of her cinematic gestures have paid off, some have not, but, on balance, she has fashioned a consistently absorbing entertainment that never becomes either campy or facetious, given its inescapable exaggerations. Take the 24 sons of Titus Andronicus … please. Twenty have been killed in battle when the play and the movie open, and three more will follow their siblings before all the incessant intrigues are fully unraveled.
Through all the carnage, Titus persists in an obstinate and perpetual foolishness that makes Lear and Othello look like shrewd judges of character. First, he picks the wrong man to be Emperor, even though Alan Cumming as the chosen Saturninus employs all of his considerable negative charisma to project a smirky evil so amusingly and brilliantly obvious as to make Titus seem mystifyingly mischievous. Then he tries to thrust his daughter at the leering Saturninus even though she has been promised to the nobler Bassianus, who has been passed over for Emperor by the clueless Titus.
When Bassianus and Lavinia defy the Emperor's edict by running off together, Titus is so outraged he kills his own son, Mutius, for assisting the two lovers. Even when Titus becomes belatedly disenchanted with the cruel and dissolute Saturninus, he falls prey to Aaron the Moor, Tamora's secret lover and apostle of prideful evildoing looking backward to Marlowe's Barabas and forward to Shakespeare's own Richard III and Iago.
The magnificently manipulative Aaron persuades Titus to allow one of his hands to be amputated and presented to Saturninus in exchange for Titus' two imprisoned sons. They are returned after a fashion, with their heads in two jars along with Titus' own severed hand. This leads to a piece of stage and screen business that reads as dementedly funny as it plays. Says the terminally chastened Titus in an I-mean-business mood to his patient brother Marcus: "The vow is made. Come, brother, take a head,/ And in this hand the other will I bear./ And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employ'd in this;/ Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth."
And Lavinia does, good sport that she is. Laura Fraser does what she can with the thankless part of Lavinia, but her unyielding sobriety is nonetheless commendable. In the more dominant parts, Jessica Lange as the vengeful Tamora, Mr. Hopkins as the hapless Titus, and Mr. Cumming as the sleazy Saturninus are comparatively known quantities in their expressive excellence, but the big surprise for me at least was the electrifying portrayal of Aaron by Harry J. Lennix. Talk about subtexts. With all his Elizabethan prejudices and outright bigotries, Shakespeare could never stay completely outside his blackest villains, literally and figuratively.
If Ms. Taymor has miscalculated at all, it is in the possible commercial crossfire between the more squeamish lovers of Shakespeare who hate any violence in movies, and the action crowd who can't believe that Shakespeare could be as horrific as any current fright merchant.
Technical Information:
Title: Titus
Year: 1999
Country: USA, Italy, UK
Director: Julie Taymor
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.61 GB
Length: 2:42:18
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97
Audio 1: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: English- Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 448 kb/s
Audio 3: English Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 96 kb/s
Audio 4: English Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 96 kb/s
Audio 5: English Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 96 kb/s
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras:
- Director's Commentary
- Scene Specific Commentary
- Isolated Score with Commentary by Composer Elliot Goldenthal
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