Shakespeare has caught a few breaks at the movies lately.
Romeo and Juliet and Richard III became vigorous films that
did honor to both the Bard and the medium. Now Julie Taymor,
the magician who on Broadway turned the Lion King menagerie
into masked enchanters on stilts, takes Shakespeare's goriest
play, Titus Andronicus, and makes it vivid, relevant and of
elevating scariness.
A boy, his face hidden by a paper-bag helmet, plays an improvised
war game with toy soldiers on his kitchen table. An explosion
startles him, the room bursts into flames, and a giant totes
him out of the present day and into 1st century Rome. Henceforward,
the action will take place in both ages. Imperial warriors,
caked with the dust of conquest, tramp through the Coliseum
like bulky action figures. Their leader Titus (Anthony Hopkins)
is a straight-spoken military man of the past; his rival,
the emperor Saturninus (Alan Cumming), is pure oil of modern
politician, seizing and betraying Titus' daughter Lavinia
(Laura Fraser). Tattoos abound, on the royal Goth captives
led by Tamora (Jessica Lange) and on the Moor Aaron (Harry
Lennix). A tiger stalks the forest.
Taymor keeps the eye as busy as the ear; she embellishes
the story without disfiguring it. There's room in her bestiary
for fine performances, a pretty collision of histrionic styles.
Cumming preens, Lennix schemes, Lange smolders. Then all cede
to Hopkins, who, in the suitably grisly finale, serves up
Titus as Hannibal Lecter with a noble vengeance. Rare and
well done!
Other movies might have bigger stars, higher budgets, deeper
tans. But if you're looking for a complex weave of word and
image, and an early clue to where film might go in its second
century, you can begin and end with this towering Titus.
