If you are going to take Shakespeare's most violent, out-of-control tragedy and put it on the screen then there is no reason to pussy-foot about. And so it is that celebrated US stage director Julie Taymor has taken the full-blooded approach for her debut movie, utilising every trick in the book of theatrical stylisation to render the unpalatable watchable. Here be horrors that are barely describable: rape, dismemberment, mutilation, cannibalism, death and destruction. Ah well, when in Rome ...
Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins) returns from war in triumph to find the empire in disarray. With the support of the Senate, Titus selects the loathsome Saturninus (Alan Cumming in Cabaret mode) as emperor. When his daughter Lavinia, unwillingly betrothed to Saturninus, runs off with her true love (James Frain), Titus is shamed and reviled by the emperor. There is worse (a lot worse) to come.
Titus's prisoners Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Jessica Lange) and her remaining two bad-seed sons (Titus having killed the third) are freed by Saturninus and pursue Lavinia and her bloke. They kill him; rape her. Just to make sure she can't reveal who is responsible they chop off her hands and cut out her tongue. Somewhat put out by this treatment of his daughter and her lover, Titus vows revenge.
Taymor's main idea is to grant Titus a universality by use of stylistic anachronism - thus ancient Rome is crossbred with Thirties Fascist-era Italy; centurions ride horses and motorcycles. This is a broader and less consistent vision than that deployed by Richard Loncraine in his film of Richard III with Ian McKellen, but the principle is the same. Taymor adds the theatrical refinement of dance and exaggerated movement, such as during the entry of Titus's mud-encrusted army into the Colosseum, marching jerkily like animated clay sculptures that recall the terracotta figures discovered in China. And the horrific vision of the mutilated Lavinia, the stumps of her wrists stuffed with twigs, recalls the nightmarish fairy tale of Strewelpeter. As the horrors mount, so Taymor counters with extended theatricality. The actors respond in kind.
After a ponderous start, Hopkins moves into top gear as Titus descends into insanity; he is matched by Jessica Lange's sensual Tamora, a revenge-seeking tattooed bitch from Hell. If the younger players are less adept at adjusting to the rigorous demands of the text and the treatment (someone should really give Jonathan Rhys Meyers a good talking to) the sheer audacity of the visual carries you along.
Thus an adolescent interpretation is delivered on a grand scale and the film succeeds by sheer weight of visual impact, down to the final bloodcurdling banquet in which Titus serves up Tamora's sons to her, baked in a extremely unpleasantlooking pie.
All the elements of unhinged vengeance, blood feuds and political intrigue reduced to the bare essence of barbaric slaughter that nourish Shakespeare's earliest (and ironically most Jacobean) tragedy are present and Taymor is to be congratulated for managing to get them on to the screen with the balance of viscous humour and unimaginable tragedy intact. Ah, the horror! The horror!
Titus
Cert: cert18
