Titus, Julie Taymor's gorgeous film version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, with Anthony Hopkins as the doomed title character, may be the most opulent release of the season...and also the most perverse, on nearly every front. It's easy to see why there has never been a feature version of this tragedy. Of the most commonly mounted Shakespearean plays, at least five -- Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Othello -- are tragedies, which seem inevitably to be accorded a higher degree of respect than the comedies. Yet even among the remaining five tragedies (or six, depending on whose classification you use), Titus Andronicus has long been the poor relation no one likes to admit to. In 1678, Edward Ravenscroft published an "improved" version, calling the original "a heap of rubbish." And in our own century, T. S. Eliot deemed the play "one of the stupidest and most uninspired" ever written. Indeed, for years, scholars sought unsuccessfully to disprove Shakespeare's authorship, as though the rest of the canon might be sullied by exposure to this "ridiculous play" (per critic Alfred Harbage).
This is either a scene from Titus or a Cure video. Probably the former.
Details
Directed by Julie Taymor
Screenplay by Julie Taymor; adapted from William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Harry Lennix, and Alan Cumming
Opens Friday.
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The play's faults actually make sense when one considers that it was, in all likelihood, the first attempt at a tragedy by a fledgling playwright looking for a hit. If the language seems recognizably Shakespearean -- Thomas Kyd never sounded this good -- the overall aesthetic resembles the more lurid plays Elizabethan audiences wanted, with a plot that often treats the characters as automatons whose main purpose is to suffer, quite graphically, onstage. And a hit it was -- by most accounts, the biggest success Shakespeare had during his lifetime. Precisely those qualities critics abhor endeared it to the public. Those same qualities make it a particularly interesting choice for the closing of the millennium. Referring to another modern production, Harbage called Titus not a tragic hero but "a man thrust blindfold into a room full of whirring knives." Sound familiar?
Well, it certainly would if you've seen any of Don Coscarelli's Phantasm films or Clive Barker's various Hellraiser movies, in which Harbage's metaphor is quite literal. The point being that Titus Andronicus is a bit like a 16th-century splatter film. (Or, as Thomas Pynchon described a similar play in The Crying of Lot 49, "a Roadrunner cartoon in blank verse.")
While it might seem ridiculous to worry about plot spoilers in describing a 400-year-old work by the world's best-known author, so few people have actually read, or bothered to remember, Titus Andronicus that I will try to be discreet. Titus (Hopkins) is a Roman general who has just successfully returned from a victorious campaign against the Goths. To avenge the deaths of his men, he makes a ritual sacrifice of the oldest son of the vanquished queen, Tamora (Jessica Lange), despite the queen's pleas for mercy.
The emperor happens to have just died, and the Roman people clamor for Titus to take the throne. But Titus is nothing if not a by-the-book kind of guy, so he insists the throne go to the emperor's oldest son, Saturninus (Alan Cumming). In one of those plot manipulations that seem simply capricious, Saturninus chooses as his empress Titus' daughter, Lavinia (Laura Fraser), who is betrothed to his younger brother, Bassianus (James Frain). When Bassianus and Lavinia try to run away together with the help of the rest of Titus' family, Titus slays one of his own sons rather than allow his kin to defy imperial will. Having served the purpose of forcing Titus to kill his son, this plot development suddenly disappears. Saturninus changes his mind, allowing Lavinia to return to Bassianus and choosing the captured queen as his bride.
Tamora immediately goes from being, in essence, a slave to being the woman behind the most powerful man in Rome. And she decides to use that power to seek revenge on Titus, who so coldly rejected her pleas for mercy in the opening scenes. In a simultaneous clunky development, the likes of which one would be hard-pressed to find in the later plays, it turns out Tamora has a secret lover -- Aaron the Moor (Harry Lennix). Aaron has been milling around in the background all along, not saying a word, but suddenly we find him addressing the audience like a narrator and becoming one of the most important movers of the action.
Tamora and Aaron manipulate Tamora's punkish sons, Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys), to stick it to Titus in every possible way. They do it well enough that Titus is slowly driven mad and eventually outdoes them all in creative ickiness. (Without getting specific, let us suggest that Hopkins was cast as much for association with the character of Hannibal Lecter as for his acting skills.) Tamora is driven by vengeance, but Aaron? Who knows? Is he driven by bitterness over his racial ostracism? By simple, inexplicable evil? (His final words are, "If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul." Now that's a villain!) All of this works itself out through disembowelment, throat-slitting, dismemberment, rape, exlinguination, and culinary delights unlikely to show up on Emeril Live.
