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Anthony
Hopkins plays Titus
Jessica
Lange as Tamora
Harry
Lennix plays Aaron
Photos courtesy of Fox Searchlight
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SAN FRANCISCO, 19
September 2000 - One can see why Julie Taymor would be the chef of
choice, if one really wanted to cook up an adaptation of Shakespeare's
Titus Andronicus. Her extravagant hand with theatrical spices
was first revealed to the world at large when she transformed Disney's
made-for-the-mass-palate Lion King into an unexpected Broadway
delight, completely reimagining it as a rich and complex creation
liberally seasoned with spices drawn from African nature and culture.
The strong meat of this early Shakespearean outing - a tale of
dismemberment, rape, mutilation (even self-mutilation), cannibalism
and more - calls for precisely such inventive and bold seasoning.
And Taymor certainly pulls no punches in her treatment.
Spectacular sets and costumes draw, sometimes with inspiration,
sometimes willy-nilly, on sources ranging from Rome and even Greece to
1930's and 1940's fascist architecure and fashion, and present-day
music videos. She expands and reimagines the work much as she did with
Disney's Lion King in bringing it to Broadway as an unexpected
visual feast (though here, perhaps, her hand is less steady - a lot of
inventive flashes, but some elements that are merely excessive or
arbitrary).
As far as the acting goes, no one is at their
best here - Jessica Lange's degenerate Goth Queen Tamora is probably
the best, and Harry J. Lennix as Aaron, the Moor, delivers real
intensity , but Anthony Hopkins' Titus is somehow less rich than one
might hope, not quite providing the film the anchor one would hope
for, while Alan Cumming's Saturninus, aiming for "imperial-decadent",
as often hits "silly". But the ultimate problem is not with
the direction, the acting, the staging - but with the material. Titus
Andronicus is certainly as intense, in its way, as anything in
Shakespeare, but it was a very early work, and a clumsy one in some
ways compared to his later achievements. Its intensity springs from
Shakespeare's refusal to draw the line anywhere, no matter what - like
Wes Craven coming up with ever-more-inventive ways for Freddie Krueger
to off teenagers. It's very hard to find the humanity in anyone in
this play - even sympathetic characters like poor Lavinia are mostly
ciphers, and figures like Aaron, and Tamora's sons Alarbus (Raz Degan)
and Chiron (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) are so perversely evil as to defy
belief. Everything seems calculated to produce maximal horror without
regard for integrity of character.
With such material, it's
not clear whether Taymor and the cast could have delivered an
unalloyed success. Titus isn't a bad film, by any stretch, and
it's certainly strange, original, inventive. This meal won't really
satisfy - and some palates might find it as unappetizing as the pie
that Titus, echoing Hannibal Lecter, cooks up in the last reel
- but the curious and the bold may want to taste it just the same.
Two and a half stars
C.
Antonio Romero is a writer and engineer based in Silicon Valley. He is
the Nouveau editor of Culturekiosque.com |
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Cinema Reviews
