Two of you asked me, after my favorable reviews of The Sixth Sense and Reindeer Games, if I'm getting soft (in exactly those words). Well, friends, fear not: the knives are out. An apt metaphor to use for Titus, a deliriously violent, absurdist mess of a movie. If I had been stinking drunk, this would have been a fucking hilarious movie. It pretty much was anyway, but seeing as how I was in a theater with other people who might have been taking it seriously, I felt the need to restrain my laughter. It all came gushing out afterwards; I swear I'm still giggling loopily an hour later.
Sounds great, right? A laugh riot at the movies, with a little blood and guts thrown in. Only problem is, it's supposed to be a tragedy, based on Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. It's directed by Julie Taymor, enfant terrible of the Broadway scene after her mega-successful production of The Lion King. Some directors' problem is that they have no vision. Taymor's is that she has too many visions, and she indulges every last fucking one of them. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, she was so busy figuring out how she could do it that she didn't stop to think if she should do it. So we start out with an annoying boy "playing" in a modern-day kitchen, and by "playing," I mean screaming and smashing his toys and throwing food around, thereby encapsulating in about five seconds 73 of the reasons I don't want to have children. And then suddenly it's the Roman Empire, and we've got Sir Anthony Hopkins as Titus (this is supposedly the movie that made Hopkins briefly vow to retire -- I WONDER WHY); and Jessica Lange as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, aka her over-the-top character in Blue Sky but with nippled armor and gold make-up; and Alan Cumming, looking and acting like the love child of PeeWee Herman and Satan (or maybe just Cher), as the Emperor Saturnine; and Tamora's club-kid sons, one of whom is Jonathan Rhys Meyer, still wearing his outfits from Velvet Goldmine -- and every character is more annoying and unlikable than the last.
And for no reason at all, some actors are dressed in Roman armor and some are dressed like Al Capone and some are dressed like Mussolini and some are dressed like leather fetishists and some are dressed like British soccer hooligans and there are chariots and motorcycles and tanks and bows-and-arrows and Uzis. Are you getting the idea? NOTHING MAKES SENSE. I'm all for setting Shakespeare in new environs and times; I loved Ian McKellen's Richard III. But that had a purpose. That had consistency. It was set in the Fascist era because that theme fit with the play's message. The director may have thought, partway through making the movie, "Gee, this would also work well in, say, the Renaissance," but he stuck with the setting he already had. Because switching to another style wouldn't make sense. I cannot emphasize this enough. Experimentation is great, but you can't just throw props and costumes and colors up on the screen because they look cool. They have to mean something to the story. But Taymor is concerned exclusively with visuals, the more outrageous the better. She often focuses on one of her outlandish props, with the actors relegated to the background. In fact, the actors are little more than props in many scenes, carefully arranged for maximum visual impact with little regard to how it affects the dialogue.
Right, well, you get the idea. After the first act, the film suddenly switches gears, intentionally or not, into high camp, sort of like if Shakespeare wrote cabaret. I was rolling my eyes so much I'm surprised they didn't spin right out of my head and go bouncing down the aisle. It doesn't help that Titus Andronicus is not one of Shakespeare's more accomplished plays (or so I've heard). A lot of the characters' actions don't make sense, and everything's rather overwrought. And did I mention it was violent? The climactic scene literally nauseated me. But a few worthy moments glimmer through that made me wish a less self-congratulatory director had made this film. Hopkins is, as always, excellent, and Lange has her moments as well. Angus MacFadyen is intriguing, if far too little seen, as one of Titus's sons, Lucius. Harry Lennix is brilliantly evil as the unrepentant Moor who orchestrates many of the horrible events that befall Titus and his clan.
The movie ends with, I kid you not, a five-minute-long shot of the annoying kid from the beginning walking into an obviously fake sunset, with nothing else going on except swelling music. For five minutes. With his back to you.
Should you see it? Depends how much you value style over
substance.
Also depends how drunk you are.
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