Titus

Rating:
Summary: A Great Play With No Direction
Review: Julie Taymor's adaptation of one of Shakespeare's more obscure plays comes short in everything except the acting. This is due mainly to Julie Taymor's poor direction and choice of scenery: lacking any vision or purpose as to what theme she wants to convey by choosing such over-the-top disconjointed stage backgrounds.

The story revolves around the Roman general Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins) who returns to avenge the death of his sons against Tamora(Jessica Lange), a Gothic queen who has seduced the new emperor to advance her own ambitions. Factions form and a bitter power struggle ensues with murder, rape, incest, and cannibalism. This great play was horribly mutilated by Julie Taymor's pretentious attempts at using flashy montages that had no point or message other than for shock value and being pretentiously provocative.

Taymor carelessly mixes modern motifs with traditional ones (e.g. motorcycles and guns with togas and swords, etc.) and turns the play into a pseudo-intellectual farce. Such techniques are hardly new and were effectively used by film makers who, unlike Taymor, had a point to make. Fellini sparingly (emphasis added) used some futuristic costumes and designs in his 'Satyricon' to convey the theme that the norms of ancient Rome were both strangely distant yet peculiarly near to those of our post-industrial culture. More recently in a modern adaptation of 'Richard III', Richard Loncraine changes the context of Shakespere's play into an imagined England which succombs to the fascism of the 1930s. Here Loncraine's approach is less symbolic than Fellini and simply transplants Shakespeare's entire play into the future. Unlike the latter films Taymor seems to want to imitate the techniques of her predecessors while forgetting why these techniques were used. The formidable acting of Antohny Hopkins and Jessica Lange is therefore suffocated along with the story itself by a careless montage aimed at shocking the audience without clear purpose.

This is nothing more than a mediocre adaptation where the director is trying to change a Shakesperean tragedy into a melange of flash costumes and scenes that hamper rather than augment the force of the play. In terms of Shakespeare adaptations, I prefer Brannagh's 'Henry V' and similar works a lot more than this film.