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Titus Review by
Cynthia Fuchs
Here's
how the world might end. Close-up of a boy's eyes. Long shot of a kitchen table,
cluttered with hot dogs, paper bags, toy soldiers, french fries, milk, and
ketchup he's using as play-blood. The kid plays with his soldiers, zooming and
roaring. You see the milk carton. You see the radio. You see an explosion blow
through the window. Glass flies, the kid ducks, and suddenly, he's swooped up by
a large man, who carries him into some basement otherworld that turns into the
Coliseum. And then you see the troops, not-quite-ancient-Roman, their helmets,
armor, and bare legs muddied, their marching weary but dead-on in synch. Like
the boy, you watch with eyes wide. Where
the hell are you? You
are in the midst of the tumultuous first scenes of Titus, Julie Taymor's
meltdown film of Shakespeare's most notoriously meltdown play, Titus
Andronicus. The images in these first few minutes are brilliant and
obnoxious, colliding fragments of bombastic history, hysterical mythology, and
the onerous world of the mundane. All
these roiling excesses -- the military strutting, the war-zoney madness, the
uncontainable passion -- are the best reasons to see Titus. Whatever else
happens, and there's a lot, this bizarre initiation is worth the price of
admission. But that isn't to say that the movie won't cost you. Titus
is based on one of the Bard's early plays, which was, reportedly, a great
success during his lifetime but dismissed by subsequent generations of scholars
and critics, mostly for its extravagance, its lunatic acts of vengeance and
violence (even aside from the basic battlefield stuff, the play features
multiple throat-cuttings and dismemberments, and one lavishly orchestrated
instance of cannibalism). The drama, in other words, doesn't get much play in
high school classrooms. And now comes Taymor, best known for her Big-Ideas
Broadway production of The Lion King, embracing the very egregiousness
that made previous readers cringe. And the result is a strange mix of daring,
indulgence, and corny FX-ed apparitions. As
you might guess from the above description, Taymor's movie (which is based on
her own 1995 off-Broadway staging of Titus Andronicus) doesn't hold much
faith in traditional realism or temporal logic. The visuals make Shakespeare's
metaphors quite literal, and the plot turns are as nutty as you can imagine,
swooping through time (from the kitchen scene to ancient Rome to the Elizabethan
era). The film grants its characters room for all kinds of acting out: when
Titus (Anthony Hopkins) is at a crossroads in his life, he's actually at a
crossroads, filmed from low and high angles while he throws himself on the
ground in despair; and when Titus's daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser) is raped by
her father's enemies, she suffers several, very visible, fates worse than death,
including having her tongue cut out and her hands chopped off and replaced by
twigs. In
interviews, Taymor explains that her movie's berserker imagery has a moral
purpose: that she intends to evoke
war as eternal and continuous horror, with particular references to Bosnia,
Littleton, and Rwanda. For Taymor, children -- who learn such violence from the
models before them each day -- are key to these references. Just so, the
play-soldier-boy (Osheen Jones) you see at the beginning of the film ends up
serving variously as a witness, victim, and participant: he's eventually
identified as the young Prince Lucius, heir to his father Lucius' (Angus
Macfayden) bloody revenge plot, which has in turn been bestowed on him by his
dreadful father, the Emperor Titus himself. By showing all this vicious lineage,
the film makes clear its abhorrence of the perpetual passing-on of hostility.
But at the same time, it also can't seem to get enough of the sensational drama
that such endowments provide. This
is the movie's abiding tension: it's driven and enlivened by the very practices
it means to invalidate. Titus's detailed depictions of tortures and
murders are repulsive but also enthralling, in a macabre,
America's-Wildest-Car-Chases way. The outrageous plot anticipates many of
Shakespeare's later plays, with royal dysfunctional families, longstanding
cross-clan grudges, convenient but devastating marriages, and a host of
grotesquely evil players who seem to be just born that way. The question may be,
if such behaviors and ideas are beyond explanation (psychological or social or
something else), then how might one wage a moral... um... war against them? That
Titus or his arch-enemy, the Queen of Goths Tamora (Jessica Lange), for all
their ghastliness, appears to be occasionally sympathetic or at least
understandable (acting out of grief as much as ambition) says something about
our capacity for forgiveness of identification. In each case, it's hard to say
which response is worse, or more unnerving. As
the film opens, Titus is just returned from battle, dead bodies and prisoners in
tow. Raging, weary, and looking to teach lessons, he orders the execution of
Tamora's eldest son. This callous action infuriates her, of course, and sets in
motion her subsequent drastic efforts to avenge the boy's death. Aiding Tamora's
schemes are her remaining sons, Chiron (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, once again
deliciously wicked) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys), proto-punks in bleached hair
and tight pants, who participate in orgies, play video games, and gyrate to
walkman-blasted rock music. She also enlists the help of a weasel named
Saturninus (Alan Cummings, like his Cabaret emcee, done up with
Fuhrer-bangs and psycho eye shadow), who, as it turns out, chooses her for his
bride just after Titus selects him as the new Roman Emperor. This marriage, you
can be sure, makes Titus a bit nervous, as he must suddenly contend with a very
powerful monster he's helped to create. It
tells you something about Tamora's capacity for "intimacy," that her
most intimate partner, in crime and everything else, is her lover-slave, a moor
named Aaron (Harry Lennix). Interracial coupling is ferociously forbidden here,
so Tamora and Aaron keep their alliance secret. When they're caught coupling in
the woods by Lavinia and her own new husband, Tamora sets Chiron and Demetrius
on her while she and Aaron kill the husband. The boys rape and assault the girl
off screen (this is when they cut out her tongue and cut off her hands), leaving
her a shell of a person, her mouth a huge red gash as she stands, abandoned in a
desolate swamp. Lavinia's
ruin is the first of many brutalities, amputations, and self-mutilations, as all
the characters seem hellbent on displaying their despair in the most visceral
way possible. The royals are full of themselves, and the one forever-outsider,
Aaron, makes the most of their reckless self-infatuation. He's fiendish, wily,
and proud of his many "notorious ills," repeatedly wishing out loud
that he might have the chance to commit more. He makes several compelling
speeches indicting the racism that has shaped his perspective and his
experience. Commenting on the blackness of the child resulting from his liaison
with Tamora, Aaron anticipates and rather perversely celebrates what will become
the U.S. culture's invidious "one drop rule," when he observes that
"Coal-black is better than another hue; / In that it scorns to bear another
hue"; though he envisions the end of whiteness as a triumph of blackness,
he also, unknowingly lays the ground for the Benetton aesthetic, when everyone's
beautifully "beige." Just
before he thinks he'll be executed, Aaron lays out the motivation for his
misdeeds, hoping to exchange a confession of his many crimes for his infant
son's life. At this moment he becomes a prototypical "angry black
man," whose nefarious machinations are spurred by his desire to stick it
the self-deluding white folks. But he also lays bare, in his briefly conceded
interest in the next generation, a method to the film's seeming madness. That
is, his railing against racism and its associated class and family privileges,
Aaron points out his culture's inevitable downfall, because of factions and
infighting based on such artificial constructions. As
scary as Aaron is, Tamora and Titus are at least as maniacal and motivated.
They're lost causes, examples of what not to do or want. By the time Tamora and
sons show up in Titus's backyard, absurdly costumed to play Revenge and her
aides Rape and Murder (looking to persuade Titus to follow their advice, thus
setting him up), events have spun out of earth's orbit. Titus sees through the
ruse, however, and uses it as his opportunity to wreak havoc on the Goths he
despises so absolutely. For the rest of you, who've seen a movie or two, this
turn of events leads directly to the movie's most horrific sight gag, wherein
Titus serves a meal to Tamora and Saturninus and appears as nothing less than
Hannibal Lecter dressed in chef's attire, hat cocked and cutlery brandished. Despite
Taymor's stated aim to sensitize viewers to today's similar atrocities, the
spectacle almost makes for an opposite effect: it's surreal and distanced, more
than immediate and frightening. And her addition to the finale,
post-standard-Shakespearean-clean-up-speeches, may be the strangest moment of
all, in a movie full of them. Titus's final wordless image shows two
figures exiting the Coliseum, moving beyond the play's pile-up of corpses,
beyond the world Shakespeare portrayed. After all it has shown you, this crazy
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