Titus

This review was written for oxygen.ie. You can see it there by clicking here

Titus opens in somewhere that looks like the present. A young boy is eating and playing with action figures. He starts making an awful mess bashing the plastic toys into the mushy cakes. Then a dark figure enters and picks him up and the boy is carried down a tunnel and they resurface in the middle of a ruined Roman amphitheatre. Then the amphitheatre isn't ruined anymore. Roman soldiers in full battle garb march in and the famous general Titus is returning from a victorius campaign against the Goths. The boy doesn't seem surprised by this. Then woman start getting ravished and men start getting brutally killed.

Titus Andronicus is the least popular of Shakespeare's plays with the critics. It is one of his first - some scholars have doubted whether Willy wrote it at all. It is rather tasteless. There is little time given over to exploration of the deep themes and the like. Titus fairly rollicks along. Just about every scene in the first hour hurtles the action in an unexpected direction. As Shakespearean tragedies go it scores fairly low on character development, but exceptionally high on gore and sensational goings on. Apparantly this was a hit with the rabble in the Elizabethan cheap seats and established the young Willy as a commercial success. And all the things that made it popular with the 1590's humble commoners- the rapes, murders, gruesome amputations, cannibalism and the occasional naked and nubile body - make it an ideal choice for a film version in the year 2000.

Titus is directed by Julie Taymor. This lady has some imagination. Taymor is mostly known as a theatre director and is famous for her unorthodox stagings of traditional plays. Titus is nominally set in ancient Rome, but the costumes, settings and architecture veer erratically through a huge number of places and eras. The emperor's soldiers wear Nazi style costumes, characters play pool and video games as they bandy rhyming couplets, the emperor's court is laid out around a massive swimming pool and is usually full of half naked characters engaged in all kinds of sexual shenanigans. Characters travel around in popemobiles and gypsy caravans. Realism is not a concern. In some of the outdoor scenes you can easily make out the telephone polls in the background.

Taymor doesn't hold back on the gruesomeness. You don't actually see the hand being severed, but you might as well. Titus is played by Anthony Hopkins in Hannibal Lecter mode. He seems to enjoy playing psychos. He has a gleam in his eye. Jessica Lange as the goth queen is also allowed over the top. Alan Cumming is creepily camp as the erratic emperor. Harry Lennix is downright evil as the Moor. Jonathon Rhys Meyers seems to be in danger of being typecast as a sulky looking girl. Laura Fraser is doe eyed and expressionless as Titus' defiled daughter Lavinia. The rest of the cast are decent enough.

Titus drags in places and some of the twists and turns do start to get a bit boring in the middle but then the final act is so edge of the seat can't look/must look that you can forgive the film it's low points. Taymor has packed in so many surreal ideas and deliberately clanging inconsistencies that some are bound to fall flat on their face. But you don't have time to dwell on the film's faults when the next scene shows a girl carrying her father's severed hand around in her mouth. That's why Titus is this week's film of the week.