TITUS (18), dir. Julie Taymor

That Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a gorefest, somewhat bereft of poetry, and dubious in its authorship, no one can dispute. It is not in hopes of encountering subtlety that we look forward to a film version with something akin to glee, for even the silver screen treatment seems unlikely to transform the leaden-versed, over-plotted play into a miracle of depth and complexity. What we've come for is not taste, but spectacle, our appetites whetted already by Gladiator's feast of Roman blood, guts and vengeance; we look to director Julie Taymor's much-lauded originality to splash even more searing images across the screen, to hyperstimulate our imagination, along with our adrenal glands.

The opening conceit is promising: a young boy, playing wantonly with his toy soldiers, sends them to sticky deaths in plates full of food, before he is suddenly abducted and transferred into the world of the drama, a world where violence is not play, except of the most perverse kind. The boy, acting as Titus' youngest child, becomes the observer, watching as characters lurch across the stage like puppets, poor malformed prototypes in bloody display-- a perverted Shylock, a mangled Ophelia, a demented Lear. We expect Taymor to overlay a skein of imagery over the original text which would allow visual, if not verbal, significance and complexity to emerge, despite the two-dimensionality of its characters, the strictly-for-thrills plot. Unfortunately, the film mirrors the faults of its dialogue, forever cranked up to a fever pitch with shrilling music and stomach-turning scenes whose nauseating effect is made still worse by wild, jumbled interjections of MTVesque surrealism. There are moments of stillness and sheer, striking imagery that achieve the poetry of tragedy-- Lavinia poised in the barren marshland, twigs tied to her stumps, mute, iconic, a female crucifixion, or Anthony Hopkins' fine Titus, face-down in the middle of a crossroads, imploring the fates, despairing of justice. However, despite striking costumes and haunting sets, the film lacks coherence; anachronisms jostle and jangle with cluttered, inchoate ideas, thematic patterns fail to form, the sense of spectacle is strangled.

When the final bloody feast arrives, Taymor treats it like a farce, and understandably so, for by this point, any tears shed or gasps groaned for mutilated Lavinia and beleaguered Titus have long since been replaced by a grim forbearance. As Titus says, there is little else to do but laugh, once sorrow has been exhausted. Everything's absurd, if dazzling, and we end, like the little boy, made hostage to a nerve-shattering thrill-ride of violence that yields neither mythology nor meaning.

Sharae Deckard, 8 / 10 / 00