January 20–27, 2000

movie shorts

Titus

recommended

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 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, the boy is 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 tumultuous center 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, colliding fragments of bombastic history, hysterical mythology, and onerous mundanity. These roiling extravagances — the military strutting, the war-zone insanity, the uncontainable passion, the superb precision and sense of commitment — are the reasons to see Titus. Whatever else happens, and there’s lots, this bizarre initiation is worth the price of admission.

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 a great success during his lifetime but dismissed by subsequent generations of scholars and critics, mostly for its excesses, its lunatic violence and lusty vengeance schemes. 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, giddy excess and corny FX-silliness.

As you might guess from the above description, Taymor’s movie (which is based on her own 1995 off-Broadway staging) doesn’t hold much faith in traditional realism or temporal logic: It swoops through time frames (from the kitchen to ancient Rome to the Elizabethan era) and grants its characters room for all kinds of acting out, from throwing themselves to the ground in grief and raping their enemies’ daughters to railing against racism and replacing people’s lopped-off hands with tree branches.

In interviews, Taymor explains that the movie’s berserker violence has a moral purpose, that she intends to evoke war as eternal and continuous horror, with reference to Bosnia, Littleton and Rwanda. Children are key to these references, and the soldier-boy (Osheen Jones) floats throughout the film as a witness, victim and participant: He’s eventually identified as the young Prince Lucius, heir to his father Lucius’ (Angus Macfadyen) bloody revenge plot, which is in turn bestowed on him by his dreadful father, the Emperor Titus (Anthony Hopkins). While, on one level, the film clearly means to abhor this perpetual passing-on of hostility, it also can’t seem to get enough of the sensational drama it provides. Its huge, gorgeous images of torture and murders are repulsive but also enthralling, in a terrible, America’s-Wildest-Car-Chases way. The outrageous plot anticipates many of Shakespeare’s later plays, with royal families, longstanding grudges, convenient marriages and grotesquely evil players. 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 the eldest son of Tamora, Queen of the Goths (Jessica Lange), thus setting in motion her desperate efforts to avenge herself. Aiding Tamora’s schemes are her remaining sons, Chiron (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, once again deliciously wicked) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys), punks who participate in orgies, play video games and gyrate to walkman-blasted rock music. Her most intimate partner is also her slave, a Moor named Aaron (Harry Lennix), and the man she marries in order to engineer Titus’ downfall is his own choice for emperor, Saturninus (Alan Cumming, like his Cabaret emcee, done up with Führer-bangs and psycho eye shadow).

Conflicts among these characters grow exponentially, twisted with their loneliness, arrogance and implacable bitterness. When newly installed Emperor Saturninus selects Tamora as his bride, Titus must suddenly contend with a very powerful monster he’s helped to create (by ceding the thone to Saturninus and killing Tamora’s son). Caught in the woods with Aaron by Titus’ daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser), Tamora sets Chiron and Demetrius on her, who rape and assault Lavinia offscreen, leaving her a haunting apparition, cast out in a desolate swamp, handless and tongueless. And then there’s the big culinary finale, which offers the stupendously comic sight of Hannibal Lecter dressed in chef’s attire, hat cocked and cutlery brandished.

Lavinia’s ruin sets in motion a series of amputations, throat-cuttings and self-mutilations, as everyone seems hell-bent on displaying their despair in the most visceral way possible. The royals are full of themselves, and the one outsider, the slave Aaron, makes the most of their reckless self-infatuation. He’s fiendish, wily and proud of his many "notorious ills."

Just before he’s to 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. And here, in Aaron’s briefly conceded interest in the next generation, you can spot a method to the film’s seeming madness. 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, rather than immediate and frightening. Titus’ final image shows two figures exiting the coliseum, moving beyond the play’s pile-up of corpses, beyond the world Shakespeare portrayed. And this may be the film’s most outrageous moment, when, after all it has showed you, it allows for hope.