I first saw Titus when I was 14 or so, and about the only thing I retained from that viewing was the harrowing scene where Lavinia (Laura Fraser), after being mightily abused and mutilated, is discovered by her horrified uncle Marcus (Colm Feore). The rest of the film went mostly over my head, I think—I was in the habit at that age of watching films I was, all things considered, a bit too young to fully get. But now, on the brink of turning 30, having seen Titus Andronicus on stage twice and having become far more experienced with Shakespeare in general—even appearing in three Shakespeare plays myself—it was time to give it another go.
It was an appropriate, if coincidental choice, for viewing on Veterans Day, as Titus himself has given so much to Rome upon the battlefield, but ends up forsaken by her, in part because of bad luck and the inherent corruption of Rome (“but a wilderness of tigers”), and in part because the ruthless implacability which made him a great warrior serves him ill in peace. It also happens to be the film’s 20th anniversary; a week before the new millennium began it opened to mixed reviews, not surprising owing to the play’s poor reputation among scholars and director Julie Taymor’s brazen style. But Titus has aged very well on the whole, and if some of its gimmicks don’t land and a few of the performances seem off-key, it has enough grandeur and sterling acting to earn it a place in the Shakespearean cinematic canon.
Titus (Anthony Hopkins) returns victorious from war against the Goths, with their queen Tamora (Jessica Lange) and her sons as prisoners. Because 21 of his own 25 sons have died in the war, he orders that Tamora’s eldest son Alarbus be sacrificed to appease their souls. Tamora begs for mercy, but Titus will not be moved, and Alarbus is killed, with Tamora swearing revenge. Titus is then offered the imperial throne, the previous emperor having died, but he declines, choosing instead to recommend the emperor’s eldest son Saturninus (Alan Cumming) for the throne. This dismays Bassianus (James Frain), who had also wanted the throne, and who is betrothed to Lavinia, Titus’ daughter. He is further dismayed when Saturninus decides to make Lavinia his empress, which Titus agrees to.
Matters get worse when Bassianus and Titus’ surviving sons spirit Lavinia away from Saturninus, and Titus, giving chase, angrily kills his son Mutius (Blake Ritson), only to be told by Saturninus that he has no more interest in Lavinia, having turned his interest towards Tamora, who becomes his empress. She, in league with her lover Aaron the Moor (Harry Lennix), seek to get back at Titus, and an opportunity presents itself when we learn that Tamora’s surviving sons, Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) are both infatuated with Lavinia. So a plot is hatched, whereby during a royal hunt, Bassianus and Lavinia will be lead astray, where Chiron and Demetrius will kill him and rape and murder her, after which two of Titus’ remaining sons will be framed for Bassianus’ murder. All goes to plan, except that Lavinia is left alive but mutilated; her tongue is cut out and her hands cut off, leaving her unable to identify her attackers.
Titus begs in vain for his sons’ lives, and his one remaining son Lucius (Angus Macfadyen) is banished from Rome for attempting to rescue them. Titus, upon learning of Lavinia’s assault, decides to withdraw to his country home. He is soon approached by Aaron, who tells him that he may save his sons if he will cut off one of his hands and send it to Saturninus. He gladly does so, but Aaron was deceiving him, and the hand is returned to him with his sons’ heads. Titus now begins to consider his revenge, and when Lavinia is able to identify Chiron and Demetrius by scratching their names in the sand with a stick, his course becomes ever more clear. But securing his revenge will be just as bloody an enterprise as the deeds which led to it.
Titus Andronicus may owe it’s relatively weak reputation amongst Shakespearean scholars to its relative lack of depth, either in story or character; while there a flickers of a theme about the value of mercy and the ways in which violence begets violence, it’s not a psychologically complex play; the biggest mystery in it, for me at least, is why Titus supports Saturninus as emperor, a mystery which Taymor does not help resolve by depicting him from his first entrance as a power-hungry fascist. Not that Bassianus is necessarily better, but Saturninus’ seniority is about the only reason I can think of for Titus’ verdict—but since Titus doesn’t seem to have the best judgment anyway, it may be less of a mystery than I suppose.
Titus‘ critical stature isn’t helped by its extreme bloodiness and grotesquerie; the infamous final scene alone features four murders in the space of a single page (three in the space of four lines), on top of the cannibalism which has already been taking place. Unwitting cannibalism, to be sure, but compared to that the bawdy jokes in Romeo and Juliet seem positively benign. That Titus lacks many truly memorable lines doesn’t help much, either; there are worthy passages, like Aaron’s speech to Lucius and the Goths, a declaration of unrepentant, even joyful villainy—
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (V.i.)
—but for the most part Titus is not especially distinguished as poetry. There have long been questions over its authorship, and many (but not all) scholars believe it was at least partially written by George Peele; others feel a young Shakespeare wrote it all by himself, while still others argue Shakespeare could not have written it at all.
But what makes Titus work in the theater, and work so well on the screen, is the force of its story and the boldness of its violence. It’s a fierce, uncompromising depiction of wrongs and revenges, and in the hands of a smart director it can be a galvanizing experience. Likewise, if the characters are not among Shakespeare’s most richly drawn, they can be, when played by a capable cast, amply compelling. And the film Titus has both.
Taymor tips her stylistic hand from the start, when we see a young boy, a paper bag over his head, in a 20th-century American kitchen playing wildly with his toys upon a table full of food—he pours ketchup over several of them to simulate blood, for example. A noise, growing in intensity, causes him to cover his ears and scream, until an explosion blows out one of the kitchen’s windows and a man swings in, taking the boy in his arms and leaving the now-burning house, where we find ourselves in the center of a colosseum, and the bag is pulled off the boy’s head, revealing him to be Young Lucius (Osheen Jones), who then sees Titus’ soldiers marching in highly stylized fashion into the colosseum as the opening credits begin to roll.
Most of the film after that point is more straightforward, though plenty of other bizarre flourishes appear. But this strange, heavily symbolic opening serves to wrest the viewer—especially the scholarly viewer—away from the expectations engendered by decades of respectfully literal Shakespearean adaptations. Not to speak ill of Olivier, Branagh, or anyone else, but none of them reimagined the Bard on film as totally as Taymor does here. You can argue how successfully Taymor’s various devices work—and their influence on later stagings of Shakespeare and other pre-modern plays, many of which I’ve found tiresome in their efforts to be “relevant” and “timeless,” should not be discounted—but for the most part, they do.
The film does not go for a unified aesthetic so much as a general sense of the past, accentuating the remove which the stylized language imposes. Making use of the Fascist architecture of the 30s, Taymor most heavily evokes the mid-20th century in her world-building, but even then with touches which hearken back to ancient times (like the armor the soldiers wear) and forward to the present day (the video games Chiron and Demetrius play). That it works as well as it does is thanks in part to Taymor’s comparative restraint and her affinity for the play—the film draws heavily from her earlier stage production, and even has some of the same cast. It’s bold and daring, but it’s not reckless.
Superb technical work across the board helps a great deal. Luciano Tovoli’s cinematography is stark and classical or wild and contemporary as befits the moment, and it shows off Dante Ferretti’s sets (which are superior throughout) to fine advantage. Milena Canonero’s Oscar-nominated costumes encompass a wide range of times and styles, but most heavily draw on 30s Italy, with a blend of 20th-century suits and Fascist garb. No matter the style, they are finely executed. And Elliot Goldenthal’s fantastic score ranges from classical epic themes (with plenty of chanting choruses) to modern jazz (especially in the scenes focusing on Aaron), and is all in all so good that Tyler Bates “drew” upon it for his own score for 300. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?)
But as it should be with Shakespeare, it’s in the acting that Titus really excels. Hopkins is unsurprisingly excellent as Titus, making him sympathetic as his world crumbles around him, even though so much of his suffering comes directly from his own hard-heartedness. He delivers the Shakespearean dialogue with conviction, whether in moments of heightened passion (the “I speak to the stones” monologue) or in lighter moments (the scene with the fly). The production was apparently a difficult one for Hopkins—on finishing the film, he reputedly flipped off the camera—but his performance is spot-on, right down to the final scene where Titus goes entirely over the top and Hopkins doesn’t miss a step in doing so.
But the best performance might actually be Lennix’s. It doesn’t hurt that Aaron is a great part—he’s a deliciously wicked individual who revels in his own wickedness, but has just enough of a soul left to protect the bastard son he fathers with Tamora (oh yeah, that happens), even with his own life. All of this Lennix plays with supreme control, relishing the villainy without becoming self-indulgent and conveying the protective paternalism with sincerity, and his command of the verse is no less impressive than Hopkins’; he also conveys the bitterness Aaron feels at being constantly insulted for his blackness such to give him a modicum of sympathy. It’s a glorious performance, so much so that you wish there were more of it.
Lange, though a touch less confident in the Shakespearean language, is a suitably wicked and conniving Tamora, and when she plays Revenge with the aim of tricking the seemingly mad Titus (with Chiron and Demetrius as Rape and Murder), she pulls off one of the film’s most stylized costumes with relish. Cumming, while a little too transparently evil to convince one that Titus would support him as emperor, is a fun, campy Saturninus, childishly amoral yet quite convincing in his portrayal of power-hungry infantilism. Feore makes the rather gray role of Marcus effectively poignant in his dogged loyalty to his family. And Fraser is mostly quite solid as the largely mute Lavinia, who must bear her sufferings in frustrated silence.
Less successful are Meyers and Rhys. Chiron and Demetrius are brutal delinquents, to be sure, but they’re more often simply tiresome, given too much to wild screaming and overt gesticulating such as reminded me, again, of all the bad Shakespeare I’ve seen where every sex scene, or even any lewd reference, was accompanied by the most overwrought body language—spread-eagling, dry-humping, etc.—ostensibly meant to be bawdy but more often simply embarrassing to behold. Their aesthetics don’t help; they’re imagined as semi-modern punks, but they look more like they came out of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (and specifically the ball scene in that film) than from any kind of contemporary reality. And the imagery Taymor builds around them too often evokes 90s music videos, making their scenes feel the most dated in a film which otherwise holds up well after 20 years.
They’re bad enough to dampen one of the most brutally effective scenes in the play, where Chiron and Demetrius mock the mutilated Lavinia, but then again, Taymor later omits a few key lines during the triple homicide at the play’s climax, showing that even she is not incapable of error. (Those lines rhymed, too. How can you pass up having people rhyme whilst killing each other?)
But those missteps aside, Titus is a fine film, one of the best—probably the best—non-traditional Shakespeare films, keeping the language and staying true to the spirit of the play whilst reimagining it so completely. Despite an epic length of 162 minutes, it goes by briskly, and even if the play is not one of Shakespeare’s best, its sheer dramatic force and overwhelming brutality make it a winner of a film. Highly recommended.
Score: 85
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