[In the following review of Titus, Nochimson highlights the cinematic innovations of director Julie Taymor's anachronistic adaptation of Titus Andronicus, and praises the individual performances of Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and Harry Lennix in the film.]

Julie Taymor's film Titus, adapted from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, makes manifest why this play, once considered so inferior that scholars doubted its paternity, has recently gained a new lease on life. Taymor herself mounted the play in 1994 for Theatre for a New Audience at St. Clement's Church in New York City and has used the cinematic medium to open up her own well-regarded stage production. Film has increased Taymor's options, or perhaps more accurately she has seized upon them, to render Shakespeare's play a mirror for the horrific violence of the twentieth century and to offer a tentative hope of better things to come. Her Titus is a viscerally gripping human drama that reveals our darkest natures and the worst excesses of the cultures we build. At the same time, it is a brilliant, self-aware meditation on violence and the tragedy of the seemingly irresistible, self-destructive human impulse to answer outrage with outrage. Matching the sublimity of the film itself is the two-disk Special Edition DVD of Titus, produced with unprecedented “extras” taped before and during the shooting of the film, a benchmark in the use of the new technology.

Although she has cut lines from her source material and added visual elements not found in the original, Taymor has been faithful to the letter and spirit of Titus Andronicus. She has scrupulously avoided adding verbal text, and has used her remarkable visual sense to create a vivid representation of Shakespeare's particularly harsh version of the Renaissance revenge tragedy. The result is a film that realizes the subtlety and breadth of Shakespeare's treatment of a story that in its narrowest interpretation is a Roger Corman dream scenario of nonstop atrocity. The gore-filled events begin when eponymous hero, Titus (Anthony Hopkins), enters Rome after a triumphant foray against the Goths, bringing with him, as prisoners of war, Tamora, their Queen (Jessica Lange), and her three sons. Titus has barely reaped the obligatory honors when he initiates a domino effect series of horrible revenges and worse counter-revenges. There is nothing personal in the initial act, which is precisely the problem. A rigid, dutiful man, Titus cleaves to the letter of Roman custom when he sacrifices Alarbus (Raz Degan), Tamora's oldest son, to honor the Roman dead, coolly confronting the distraught mother with the spectacle of her son's entrails burning on an altar. His blind obedience to this Roman practice begins the transformation of Tamora into a kind of Goddess of Revenge, and his second blind choice stacks the wood and hands her the matches for his own auto-da-fé. Titus endorses as the new Emperor of Rome Saturninus (Alan Cumming), the older but obviously dissolute son of the previous Emperor, instead of his younger, worthier brother Bassianus (James Frain), simply because of the traditions surrounding family rank. But tradition means nothing to Saturninus, who, a few twists of the plot later, makes Tamora his Empress, thus giving Titus's enemy absolute power over him.

As Empress, Tamora joins her black servant, and lover, Aaron (Harry Lennix), in a reign of terror against the weakened Titus and the carnage comes thick and fast. Aaron, the extension of Tamora's fury, instigates her sons Chiron (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) to kill Bassianus and rape Titus's daughter, Lavinia (Laura Fraser). Spurred on by Tamora, they cut off Lavinia's hands and tongue to keep her from identifying them as her attackers and also from reporting Tamora's infidelity, which she witnesses. Aaron ices the cake by framing two of Titus's sons for the murder of Bassianus, and then tops himself by tricking Titus into cutting off his hand thinking that this will ransom the lives of his convicted sons, who have already been executed. Titus, on discovering Tamora's full culpability in his family's afflictions, turns her literally into the cannibal her insatiable vengeance has figuratively made of her. He kills Tamora's sons, chops them up to make the meat pies he feeds to her at a banquet, and then reveals to her exactly what is on the menu. A triad of revenge killings follow. Titus kills Tamora, and Saturninus retaliates by killing him. Titus's oldest son, Lucius (Angus MacFadyen), kills Saturninus to avenge his father's death, and becomes the new Emperor.

In lesser hands, this bloody rampage can collapse into Grand Guignol, a circus of grotesque horror that deadens audience empathy and produces nervous giggles. Taymor, however, keeps the audience fully engaged, partly stylizing the relentless violence to provide some cushioned distance from its almost unbearable savagery. She uses clowns and a penny-arcade metaphor to produce surreal images of character emotions and a paradoxical merging of the artifacts of numerous centuries to “blend time.”

“Blending time” describes the layering of historical eras in the scene and costume design and in the composition of the music to set the tragedy on a timeless stage. The look and feel of the film is a pentimento. Layers are scraped here and built up there, creating a mise-en-scène that places the characters on every point of the continuum between the year 1 and the year 2000. The prologue, in which a young boy plays happily with his toys until his violence comes to life and terrifies him, takes place in a formica and aluminum kitchen. When the ferocity of the play violence crosses the line and the kitchen bursts into flame, the child is rescued by a clownlike figure smacking of old, silent movies, who carries him down a ‘rabbit hole into an ancient coliseum. There he is confronted by a spectacle of the old conflated with the new: ancient Roman soldiers covered in blue mud, some of whom are riding motorcycles and some of whom are driving chariots. The conflations continue. Some of the scenes are filmed in the ancient setting of Hadrian's villa, and some are filmed on the steps of ‘the square coliseum, Mussolini's intended government building, built to recreate the ‘glory that was (ancient) Rome. Other sets flavor antique grandeur with the jazz ambiance of a modern nightclub.

The costumes similarly combine motifs. Drapery accessorizes modern business suits. As Titus learns his lessons of woe, his armor yields to the corduroy and wool of twentieth-century sports clothes. In her first appearance, Lavinia is dressed and gloved à la Grace Kelly with the jeune-fille modesty of the 1950s while when we first see Tamora, she wears sexy Wonder Woman-like golden armor and a bedraggled fur coat of indeterminate period. An early scene in which Saturninus and Bassianus compete for the crown of Rome depicts Saturninus's retinue as a combination of Hell's Angels and Mussolini Fascists, while Bassianus rides in a 1950s convertible (with the top down) evoking the more benign, if still questionable, materialism of capitalism. When Titus is almost mad from suffering, he plays a scene in a bathtub, à la Marat.

Composer Eliot Goldenthal's musical score also reflects the esthetic of temporal melange. The extraordinary scene in the coliseum where the action of the play proper begins is scored with the percussive sound of Korean musical instruments that Goldenthal employed to achieve a “timeless” aura: of classical Rome and yet also of today. The “libretto” for this rhythmic, staccato sound is a Latin translation of the opening lines from the original Titus script that were edited out of the movie by Taymor. This smart and imaginative combining of elements yields to more musical syncretism: a Bach-like “pity” theme that accompanies the humiliation of each character in turn during the action, jazz for the orgies, and circus ditties for the more radical stylizations. Finally there is the extraordinary juxtaposition of the scene of the climactic cannibal dinner party, in which all characters innocent and guilty feast on human flesh, with a lilting popular song called “Vivere” (Live!) that flourished on the radio in Fascist Italy the week before Mussolini was killed.

But these musical and visual pyrotechnics give the audience only a minimum of relief, not enough to totally estheticize the horror and take the spectator completely off the hook. Visceral engagement in the human tragedy is maintained by a distinguished cast that feelingly depicts the suffering of all the characters caught between internal and external absurdity. The flash-point of Taymor's esthetic of simultaneous detachment and engagement is a young boy (Osheen Jones), completely her own invention for the film, who plays violent games in a mid-twentieth-century kitchen as prologue to the action. As the action begins, he gradually morphs into Titus's grandson, Lucius, son of Titus's surviving son of the same name. This child provides the point of view of the film; we see the violence through his somewhat detached, innocent but equally violent eyes; yet as a part of the story he is also able to feel the pain of the situation and ultimately to redeem it.

Through all this discontinuity is woven the scarlet thread of the continuity of human emotional life. There is nothing fragmented about the progress of the inner lives of the characters which unwind along an unremitting line of suffering and perhaps some awakening knowledge. All the featured players are working at maximum capacity, but the blockbuster performances are turned in by Hopkins and Lange, whose relationship as the nightmare version of Oberon and Titania—universal father and mother at odds over children—is augmented by brilliant surreal visualizations of their internal lives. Lange's Tamora, who lives only long enough to learn that what goes around comes around, makes this film work by embodying a woman strong, sexual, and intelligent enough to motivate not only Saturninus's sudden decision to marry her but also her ability to get away with all her subsequent machinations—until the film's shocking finale.

Hopkins's Titus is the definitive performance of this role, the actor's intuitive grasp of rationally inexpressible elements of human nature driving him from the stubborn rigidity of a humanity almost completely paralyzed by spiritual rigor mortis to a fully flowered acceptance of pain and love. Their onscreen appearances together are the meeting of irresistible force with immovable object, articulated by Taymor with images of fire. These images reach their apogee just after Tamora is made Empress and she and Titus face each other, silently and alone for a moment, as pillars at the extreme edges of the film-frame horizon while the fire burning Alarbus's body erupts phantasmically between them.

Harry Lennix's Aaron is a close second to these matched triumphs, constructing, as he amazingly does, a subtext of change and growth for a character that on paper is a flat villain. Aaron is the first person of color to act as a main character in a Shakespeare play. A prototype for lago and Richard the Third, Aaron is an evil isolate who confides fully only in the audience, while he maintains a cool distance from lovers and opponents alike.

Unregenerate to the last, he regrets in his final moments only that he did not have time to do more harm. The medium of film, however, with its intimate probing of facial cartography, gives Lennix the opportunity to create against all odds an inner life that complicates the acid of Aaron's dialog and makes sense of Aaron's one human gesture. When Tamora gives birth to their son, its black skin threatens to reveal her infidelity, and Aaron uses all his powers and skills to keep the child alive. Finally, he willingly trades his life for a promise from Titus's honorable son, Lucius, that the child will be spared and provided for. Lennix's Aaron is the performance of a lifetime, a nuanced portrait of a man despised for his color by both the Latin and the Teutonic peoples, who transcends the horrors of the revenge he takes against their prejudice by sacrificing his life for his son.

That baby, Shakespeare's invention, is the focus of the hope that Taymor grants the audience after the carnival of blood by means of her own invention of the young boy (AKA young Lucius) through whose point of view we witness the drama. Breaking the chain of hatred, as his father assumes the office of Emperor, young Lucius offers his love to the son of Aaron and Tamora, perhaps forestalling a new generation of evil. He tenderly embraces the infant, raising him from the cage to which the new-supposedly gentler-Roman Establishment has consigned the little one, and carries him from the ancient world into the rising sun and our time, a possible emissary of new possibilities.

DVD options offer two guided tours through Titus, one featuring commentary by Taymor and one by Goldenthal, in which they explore their choices, plus substantial interviews with Hopkins and Lennix, a post-screening discussion between Taymor and graduate students at Columbia University, and interviews with the special-effects designers. But the most extraordinary of these portals of insight into the film are scenes of the cast and crew in pre-production. Taymor's visual work diary is unquestionably stage managed to produce a ‘happy family-image, but, despite the obligatory choruses of praise by all for all, a subtext emerges that spotlights the creative frictions on the set, the joyous rare opportunity for actors to put the full range of their intelligence and acting muscle to work, and a contrast between the well thought out ideas that work and those that don't. Lange and Hopkins in an abstract discussion about revenge is as exciting as watching them work on their performances. So are the beneath-the-surface emotions that bleed through the veneer. Taymor and Hopkins hug fervently, but we can see a sharp creative clash between a perfectionist director and her the-first-take-is-the-good-one star. Taymor speaks lightly about working with the almost naked cast and a pressured crew in bitingly cold weather in a superbly preserved ancient coliseum in Croatia, and of the ‘discomforts’ of Lange's armor. But clearly this is a determined director who relentlessly drove her people through an ordeal few would care to relive.

We are led through the genesis of brilliantly conceived successful special effects that use a carnival motif to make visible interior states. But we also hear much about a patently over-intellectualized decision to build a stone crossroads near a Stonehenge-like structure, at which Titus was to reach the figurative crossroads of his life. The scene in which it appears is indeed emotionally wrenching, as the once proud Titus collapses to the ground begging the uncaring Romans for the lives of his falsely accused sons, but it is the performance that carries the scene, not the literal crossroads. This is one concept that cannot be said to authentically pay off, and how fascinating to be on the inside pondering the creative strategies as well as on the outside surveying the result.

Taymor's multilevel Titus is complimented by a multiperspectival insight into the creative process. More, the technology of DVD is unexpectedly rendered a vehicle by which this profound and dazzling public treatise on violence and retribution becomes an intimate encounter in which audience and artists seem almost to merge.