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Taymor has come up with one genuinely striking image. The mutilated Lavinia is found by her Uncle Marcus (Colm Feore) standing atop a tree trunk in a swampland of dead trees, with dead tree branches tied to her stumps in a mockery of hands and fingers. Playing, as it does, off Marcus' line "what stern ungentle hands/Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare/Of her two branches," the image works in tandem with the words and, for the one time in the film, makes the play's cruelty transcendent and horribly lyrical, instead of just garish.

Film versions of Shakespeare don't have to be merely straightforward renderings in order to work. Orson Welles' film of "Othello" does wonders with a greatly truncated text, and for all its excesses Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo & Juliet" does exactly what a production of that play should do: make you fall in love with the lovers and make you believe they love each other. But most of what Julie Taymor has done here is in the service of Julie Taymor. It's as if she deliberately chose "Titus" to show off what she can do with a bad play. (And also to make sure that there's nothing to upstage her.) She certainly doesn't serve either Shakespeare or her actors.

Hopkins' best moments are the quietest ones, as when Titus upbraids his grandson (his brother in the play) for killing a fly or, the most moving moment in the entire film -- perhaps because the simplicity of emotion stands out in the surrounding morass -- when he finds he can interpret the expressions of the now-mute Lavinia and realizes she is trying to tell him she "drinks no other drink but tears." As Tamora, Jessica Lange has a palpable hunger to play this avenging queen's deviousness, but Taymor hasn't probed the character to bring out the mother's love that sets her schemes in motion, so the role is rather cartooned (and Lange is treated cruelly by the camera).

Alan Cumming, who plays Saturninus, the green emperor who falls under Tamora's spell, seems to have played the part already. It's not very far into his film career and already his preening, decadent shtick feels like yesterday's shmattes. Saturninus is supposed to be dominated by Tamora but the balance of power between Cumming and Lange is so off-kilter that the union becomes comical. Done up in eye makeup and wild designer duds, the pair appear to be rehearsing the drag-bar version of "Tea and Sympathy." The best performance is Colom Feore's as Marcus, precisely because he's an oasis of calm. When he's onscreen you can relax and listen to someone speak the verse.

A bad film of "Titus" is no great loss since so much of the play is so horribly over-scaled and callously cruel to begin with. But there's one thing about the anticipation Taymor's film has aroused that bugs me, and it has to do with the chatter that always seems to accompany an acclaimed stage director's venturing into the movies. The implication comes from an old, and never really discounted, prejudice that people in the theater know what they're doing in a way that can't be expected of movie people.

Of course, the best Shakespearean filmmakers, Welles and Kenneth Branagh, started in the theater. But they showed an instinct for moviemaking, an ability to bring the plays to life without falling back on clichéd ideas of what was "cinematic." Taymor rushes from garish spectacle to static tableau, so intent on her vision of the play that she smothers nearly every moment of potential life in it. As "daring" and consciously avant-garde as it all is, her "Titus" brings back memories of the most miserable theatergoing experiences, the kind that have made generations of people hate Shakespeare, wedding the dry-as-dust approach to those horribly misjudged avant-garde productions determined to make old Shakespeare seem with-it. When a director's avant-garde notions consist of decades-old leftovers, the play isn't the thing that needs revamping.
salon.com | Jan. 7, 2000

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