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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Like so many self-conscious directors, Julie Taymor wrecks Shakespeare's already disastrous play with her own horrific vision.
Jan 7, 2000 | "Titus Andronicus," a horror show about the succession of power and the bloodlust for revenge in ancient Rome, is Shakespeare's most extreme play. At times, it's very near to Elizabethan pulp. You can tote up all the atrocities in his other plays -- like Gloucester's eyes being put out -- and still they don't come close to the grotesquerie here. Attackers rape a young woman, then cut out her tongue and chop off her hands so that she can not identify them. A mother is made to eat a pie filled with her own cooked sons. The carnage is at such a pitch that the other killings and dismemberments and tortures just feel as if they're marking time.
The play is filled with rage at the corruption of power and the inability to separate public duty from private obligation. But there isn't much poetry in it, and the memorable passages only point out how Shakespeare put his gift at the service of an obvious and brutally made point. And that's only heightened by the way some of the characters feel like first sketches for fully developed characters in later plays (Titus for Lear, Aaron the Moor for Iago).
No doubt one of the things Shakespeare meant to get at was the consuming, self-propagating nature of violence, but the characters behave barbarously and remain rather puny; they lack the dimensions that would give the play the sting of tragedy. At times, especially in the climax when the corpses start piling up like dominoes, "Titus Andronicus" seems much more like black comedy.
That may well have been the feel that stage director and first-time filmmaker Julie Taymor was going for. She opens the film in the present day with a boy playing war with toy soldiers. When his home is invaded by an ancient Roman soldier, he is spirited away to the Rome of "Titus," where he plays the role of Titus' grandson Lucius and remains a silent presence through much of the bloody action. It's an obvious point: The reality of violence far outstrips fantasies of violence. And the prologue alerts us that Taymor is not about to soft pedal the play's famous atrocities. (Though in fairness to her, she suggests most of the worst rather than showing them.)
But could her acclaimed stage productions have been as ludicrous as this? Maybe "Titus" would play as straightforward agitprop drama that took violence as its target. But Taymor's overblown technique turns the play into another sort of violent fantasy: campy art-house Grand Guignol.
When Titus (Anthony Hopkins) cuts off his hand to pay the ransom that will prevent his two sons from being killed by Emperor Saturninus (Alan Cumming), Taymor shows the severed hand being placed in a Ziploc bag. And when Titus' sacrifice turns out to be in vain and a messenger arrives bearing the heads of his sons, Taymor stages it like a drunken vaudeville number to work up the carefully staged display of the heads in the messenger's truck. In the climax, when Titus serves the captured Goth queen Tamora (Jessica Lange) the pie bearing her two sons, Shakespeare's stage direction indicates that Titus should be dressed like a cook. Taymor has Hopkins enter the scene in puffy white hat that makes him look as if he just stepped off a pizza box.
The director must have known, in both these instances, that she'd get a laugh. But the laughter distances you from any horror. And it makes no sense for Taymor to posit real violence against imaginary violence (such as the boy's playing with toy soldiers) when the violence is nothing more than a baroque version of what you might find in video games or dystopic fantasies like "The Matrix" (a much better movie).
This "Titus" looks like a jumble sale featuring the work of other directors and artists. Saturninus addresses the Roman people in a mock-Fascist setting that recalls the accounts of Orson Welles' 1930s stage production of "Julius Caesar" and the Ian McKellan film of "Richard III." Tamora's sons Chiron and Demetrius, who rape and mutilate Titus' daughter Lavinia before winding up as dinner, are kitted out in the tattoos and rock gear Baz Luhrmann used in his "Romeo & Juliet." Saturninus' orgies and the fat, leather-outfitted hookers who proposition Titus in the street have the worked-up "decadence" familiar from Fellini. And the "visions" that occasionally interrupt the film of golden-haired, trumpet-bearing angels, circus tigers and bursts of flame are like joyless forgeries of Joseph Cornell collages.
