Titus (Anthony Hopkins), the great Roman General, returns home victorious from a long war with the northern Goths during which all but his four remaining sons have died. Lucius (Angus Macfadyen), the eldest son, reminds Titus that part of the victory ritual is the human sacrifice of an enemy prisoner. Titus chooses the eldest son of Tamora (Jessica Lange), the queen of the Goths, who has been brought back to Rome as a captive with her three sons and the Moor, Aaron (Harry Lennix).
Though Tamora pleads for her son's life, Titus carries out the ritual, not out of cruelty but out of what he conceives to be a religious devotion. Tamora and her two remaining sons, Chrion (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys), vow revenge. With that, the tale of double revenge begins - first Tamora's and then Titus'.
Special Agent Matti
The eponymous hero of this great Shakespearean revenge tragedy creates the whole mess by being a tight-arsed prick and following the letter of the law rather than the spirit. If he were less adventuresome he would be an accountant (accountancy has no spirit so they all follow the letters). Fortunately for you, the audience the bean counting barstardy soon evaporates in the face of real life revenge. That means lots of blood, guts, falsehood and death. Just what you need in a classic piece of film.
The mise en scène is alternately gritty and opulent. Power begets interior decorating and Saturninus really knows a thing or two about homes and gardens. Titus, being a soldier with a family of soldiers, enjoys the harsh sturdiness of rock and gravel. Hard on the eye but great if you're in the mood for a piece of rough. Soldiers are nothing if not rough, just ask the lads up in East Timor what they do in their spare time - it sure isn't relaxing in frilly clothes and make-up.
There's also some great debauchery going down in the palace. Debauching has, unfortunately, gone out of style (Sleaze Ball aside, of course) so the rampant lechery and orgasmic hedonism of the imperial orgies is a treat for the eye, especially if you enjoy actual full frontal male nudity on the big screen (when will Hollywood get over that?). The extravagance of Tamora's golden costumery only serves to accentuate the richness of the design (pun intended).
The racism of the times doesn't sit well with modern Australia, a great land where everyone is judged by their achievements rather than the colour of their skin or the gender of their beloved or their ability to walk, talk, see, hear, etc. Unscrupulous and bloodthirsty Moors are a traditional device of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and are necessary to keep the plot rolling so you'll just have to get over it and stroke your justifiable senses of outrage and self-righteousness. Just as long as some group of wogs or gooks or (the goddess forfend) boongs doesn't sit next to you in the cinema. They really should have their own, separate cinemas so decent people don't have to associate with them.
It takes a while to get into the Shakespearean mode of listening (thees and thous and forasmuches are a bit antiquated) but once you reset your audio translation matrix the language becomes as richly rewarding as the design. Titus is long at just under three hours so make sure you go before you go, but those 162 minutes are definitely worth holding on if you forget (and there're always empty coke cups if you can't wait - it's dark, who's gonna know?). The violence and the impetus behind that violence is extremely brutal, accounting for much of the R rating. If Shakespeare were alive today he'd be writing things like Pulp fiction and Reservoir dogs (and being hailed as a genius for doing so) but filling them with ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives but being forced by the actions of others and the honour of self to perform deeds which they cannot survive.
So, watch Titus, hear Titus, remember Titus. One day it could be you.
R 18+ (Medium level violence)
162 minutes (2:42 hours)
Film: 16 May 2001
War, ritual sacrifice, infanticide, rape, nihilistic torture, honour killing, suicide, and vengeance: the ferocious, cynical and wickedly witty voice of the young Shakespeare has created a condemning dissertation on this addiction and basic nature of mankind. The glory and victory of war for one nation is grief and devastation for another. Though at times arguably necessary, once one form of violence is accepted and justified the floodgates are opened and the reverberations flow into a never-ending vicious cycle.
Tamora, the Goth queen could be the precursor for Lady Macbeth. In fact she is much more dimensional and psychologically comprehensible than Shakespeare's most famous villainess. First seen as captive, she witnesses the brutal sacrifice of her son. After her pleas of mercy fall upon deaf ears she cries out with searing venom, "Oh cruel, irreligious piety!" From this moment onward we understand her motivations and we watch in horror as the lust for vengeance transforms her into the goddess of vengeance incarnate. Along the way this extraordinary character moves us as a mother, seduces us as a sexy and sly lover and confounds us with her brilliant and cunning control as the powerful Empress of Rome.
Tamora's slave, lover and cohort in evil is Aaron, the Moor. Perhaps the most disturbing and yet contemporary of all the characters, Aaron begins as an enigma. His story unfolds as we watch in shock his master manipulation of the awful events. His nasty sense of humour and asides connect the audience to him in the same manner as an Iago or Richard III. But what sets him apart from those arch villains is that Aaron is black. Shakespeare has painted a picture of racism that is unparalleled in his other plays. The speeches of Aaron that reflect his fury at the bigoted world surrounding him, and the vile words that spew at him from others, allow us to reflect on how and why he became this godless soul. Nihilistic, atheistic, cold and calculating, this dark figure emerges as the mirror image of Titus. Titus begins as the good man, acting upon honour and a sense of morality. Aaron is the artful and self-aware devil who revels in horrific acts of atrocity without conscience. But by the end, Titus' turn as the cook closely resembles an Aaron act in its cruelty and creativity, while Aaron, the loner, evolves into a loving father, ready to sacrifice himself for the life of his child.
To frame the narrative I chose an architecture structure to function in a symbolic manner: the Roman coliseum; the archetypal dater of cruelty, where violence as entertainment reached its apex.
The film opens with a prologue that encapsulates the spectrum of "violence" as it transforms, in a matter of seconds, from innocuous entertainment to horrific reality. As the child's innocent play with his toy soldiers escalates into a palpably thunderous explosion of bombs, the boy falls through an Alice in Wonderland time warp, right into the coliseum, magically his toy Roman soldiers have become armoured flesh and blood, covered in layers of earth; Titus and his armies returning from war with a triumphant march into the arena. The conventions of the film are set in motion: archaic armour and weapons, motorcycles, tractors, tanks and horse drawn chariots, comfortably jumbled together like the toys on the boy's kitchen table. As to the spectators in the bleachers, there are none. Only the sound of their cheering, as if ghosts of past centuries were being awakened. The boy takes his part as young Lucius, Titus' grandson, and it is through his eyes we witness this tale of revenge and compassion.
The crossroads and the swamp are two examples of how location functions as ideographs for the thematic essence of a scene.
The crossroads: at a certain point Titus realises that his actions have resulted in his responsibility for the potential execution of his own sons. His self-awareness places him at a crossroads in his life, where his world view begins to unravel. Literally and figuratively, his armour is gone, he is vulnerable. The physical crossroads with its limitless vanishing points underlines his state of mind and ids relationship to his family and Rome.
The swamp: Shakespeare's words suggest it all.
There stands the spring you have stained with mud...The swamp is a metaphor for the ravishment of Lavinia. She stands deserted, on a charred tree stump, surrounded by muddy waters that gurgle with sulphur springs. Where once were hands are now gnarly twigs. The result is surreal and poetic, thus keeping with my vision of the work and not falling into the trap of utter realism. There is a danger in a literal and graphic portrayal of an image such as Lavinia's dismemberment. It is easily too grotesquely horrific and can upstage the larger picture of the event.
Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands
have lopped and hew'd and made thy body bare
of her two branches...
Within this very gritty drama there is a constant referencing to Latin and Greek mythology as well as to animal and nature's symbolism. We see the teeth of cruelty and then hear that, "Rome is but a wilderness of tigers..." Lavinia, Titus' daughter, is often referred to as a doe, and the rape and mutilation which overcome her are direct parallels to the story of Philomela in Ovid's Metamorphosis. These images became quite concrete in my mind and seemed crucial in the physical telling of the tale. Verbal motifs would become visual ones. The image of Lavinia, the doe, being ravished by Chiron and Demetrius, at once the sons of Tamora and ferocious tigers, had to be realised.
The concept of the "penny arcade nightmares" was devised to portray the inner landscapes of the mind as affected by the external actions. These stylised, haiku-like images appear at various points throughout the film counter pointing the realistic events in a dreamlike and mythic manner. They depict, in abstract collages, fragments of memory, the unfathomable layers of a violent event, the metamorphic flux of the human, animal and the divine. By the last of these surreal sequences the line between illusion and substance becomes blurred. The nightmare takes over... madness becomes clarity and the unimaginable is realised.
The finale banquet slaughter, which mirrors the opening carnage at the boy's kitchen table, ends with Lucius aiming his pistol at the Emperor Saturninus. We are in an interior set, Titus' dining room. With the reverberating blast of gunshot, the camera quickly zooms out from the table to reveal the entire scene, minus the walls, now sitting in the centre of the coliseum. this time, the bleachers are filled with spectators. Watching. They are silent. They are us.
As counterpoint to Shakespeare's dark tale of vengeance is the journey of the young boy from childhood innocence to passive witness and finally to knowledge, wisdom, compassion and choice. As the drama comes to its end young Lucius, the boy takes Aaron's baby in his arms. Holding his "enemy," the young Lucius begins to move toward the exit arch of the coliseum. As he walks, the infinite night sky within that single archway slowly gives way to dawn. The boy keeps moving toward the exit, toward the promise of daylight as if redemption were a possibility.
Julie Taymor