You can tell that this film has been made by a Tony-award winning director. You have to admire the effects she manages to wrench from a limited budget (the crowds, or lack thereof, gave it away!), achieving an epic perspective through noise, business and monumentality. But these are strictly theatrical effects, a visual sense communicated through set-design, colour etc., rather than mediated through the camera. However, it is an energetic kind of theatre, so we shouldn't mind too much.
'Titus Andronicus' is one of Shakespeare's lesser plays, so despised by highbrow fans that they tried to deny he wrote it. The play is a catalogue of horrors - an old man enters Rome with 21 dead sons; orders the dismemberment and burning of an enemy; kills a disobedient son; his son-in-law is murdered, his daughter raped with her hands and tongue cut off; he cuts his own hand off to bail two sons whose decapitated heads are sent back; his revenge involves killing the culprits and handing them back to their mother in a curiously Greenaway ritual, before a climactic orgy of massacring.
This sounds grisly, and I felt nauseous on a number of occasions reading it. In truth, this kind of shock horror was very popular at the time Shakespeare wrote it (notable peers include Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta' and Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy'), so it isn't really an aberration. As a film, 'Titus' isn't very violent; perhaps because films are generally more violent today than we expect literary classics to be. Or, as is more likely, because of the way Traymor films it. 'Titus Andronicus' is a very short and quick play, with its multiple horrors piled on at a bewildering speed. Traymor paces her film in true epic style (the film is nearly three hours long), and so the horrors seem less gratuituous, and therefore less shocking.
There is one big problem for any producer adapting 'Titus' today, and that is tone. There is so much violence in the play, that it risks seeming comic, and indeed the previously wailing Titus, faced with the peak of murderous brutality, responds with grim laughter. Despite some gruesome puns, Shakespeare's 'Titus' is largely gloomy and earnest, but slightly ridiculous.
Traymor isn't quite sure, and veers between epic solemnity and wild black comedy. Some of the latter is effective, the burlesquerie of the heads' return, for instance. But it skips over the play's main absence, Lavinia's rape. In the play, we know it's happening, but we never see it - there is a powerfully misogynistic euphemism in the dank forest pit where her dead husband lies bleeding. When we see the result of the rape, this maimed mannequin, the beautiful soliloquy of her uncle seems woefully inadequate.
But Traymor does exactly the same thing. As a woman and in a more visual and culturally liberated medium, Traymor has a chance to reclaim Lavinia's rape, to free it from aestheticism and return it to her body, but it is elided at the time, and a later flashback is a series of 'poetic' images that takes the body out of the rape, just as surely as her script takes the politic out of the body politic dialectics. It's difficult to see how anyone could do it without being exploitative, though.
People like to defend violent movies by saying that Shakespeare's plays were just as bloodthirsty - Traymor herself seems to suggest this in the pre-credit sequence. Yes, but how many slashers have Shakespeare's depths of theme and language, is the usual response. Traymor altars Shakespeare's structure, which is an intricately symmetrical pattern holding the chaotically bloody events. The play opens with a discussion of different kinds of government (democracy vs. hereditary rule) with Titus entering in a public ritual before attending to personal matters. Traymor is not interested in politics, as you would expect from an American film, and opens with the personal moving onto the public, which makes for a very different work.
I've no problem with this - faithfulness is death; adapters must make any source their own, just as Shakespeare did. But if you dismantle Shakespeare's precise structure and rhythm, you must substitute one of your own, and a cinematic one at that (this is why Welles' films are the greatest Shakespeare adaptations, because they are pure Welles). Traymor does not, and so her film, for all its inventiveness, feels lopsided, moments of power alternating with more ponderous ones, dramatic effect diluted.
Similarly, Shakespeare's rich imagery - of the body, reading and writing, surface and underground etc. - is largely forsaken, but nothing very systematic put in its place. I don't mean to carp - most people who go to these filmed plays won't have time to read the play, and so the words will fly over them (as they usually do for me). Visual impact is all, and this is infinitely more preferable to Branagh. The conflation of different periods, costumes, locations - classical, fascist, modern, Hollywood etc. - is pure Shakespeare, and offers some startling effects, especially the toy soldiers beginning.
The acting is fine, even if, snob that I am, the American voice jars among the rest. Once again, as throughout the play's history, the relatively secondary role of Aaron steals it, with Traymor mercifully not trying, through misguided political correctness, to sanitise his gleeful evil. Elliot Goldenstahl's score is a remarkable work of pastiche.
'Titus Andronicus' is one of Shakespeare's lesser plays, so despised by highbrow fans that they tried to deny he wrote it. The play is a catalogue of horrors - an old man enters Rome with 21 dead sons; orders the dismemberment and burning of an enemy; kills a disobedient son; his son-in-law is murdered, his daughter raped with her hands and tongue cut off; he cuts his own hand off to bail two sons whose decapitated heads are sent back; his revenge involves killing the culprits and handing them back to their mother in a curiously Greenaway ritual, before a climactic orgy of massacring.
This sounds grisly, and I felt nauseous on a number of occasions reading it. In truth, this kind of shock horror was very popular at the time Shakespeare wrote it (notable peers include Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta' and Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy'), so it isn't really an aberration. As a film, 'Titus' isn't very violent; perhaps because films are generally more violent today than we expect literary classics to be. Or, as is more likely, because of the way Traymor films it. 'Titus Andronicus' is a very short and quick play, with its multiple horrors piled on at a bewildering speed. Traymor paces her film in true epic style (the film is nearly three hours long), and so the horrors seem less gratuituous, and therefore less shocking.
There is one big problem for any producer adapting 'Titus' today, and that is tone. There is so much violence in the play, that it risks seeming comic, and indeed the previously wailing Titus, faced with the peak of murderous brutality, responds with grim laughter. Despite some gruesome puns, Shakespeare's 'Titus' is largely gloomy and earnest, but slightly ridiculous.
Traymor isn't quite sure, and veers between epic solemnity and wild black comedy. Some of the latter is effective, the burlesquerie of the heads' return, for instance. But it skips over the play's main absence, Lavinia's rape. In the play, we know it's happening, but we never see it - there is a powerfully misogynistic euphemism in the dank forest pit where her dead husband lies bleeding. When we see the result of the rape, this maimed mannequin, the beautiful soliloquy of her uncle seems woefully inadequate.
But Traymor does exactly the same thing. As a woman and in a more visual and culturally liberated medium, Traymor has a chance to reclaim Lavinia's rape, to free it from aestheticism and return it to her body, but it is elided at the time, and a later flashback is a series of 'poetic' images that takes the body out of the rape, just as surely as her script takes the politic out of the body politic dialectics. It's difficult to see how anyone could do it without being exploitative, though.
People like to defend violent movies by saying that Shakespeare's plays were just as bloodthirsty - Traymor herself seems to suggest this in the pre-credit sequence. Yes, but how many slashers have Shakespeare's depths of theme and language, is the usual response. Traymor altars Shakespeare's structure, which is an intricately symmetrical pattern holding the chaotically bloody events. The play opens with a discussion of different kinds of government (democracy vs. hereditary rule) with Titus entering in a public ritual before attending to personal matters. Traymor is not interested in politics, as you would expect from an American film, and opens with the personal moving onto the public, which makes for a very different work.
I've no problem with this - faithfulness is death; adapters must make any source their own, just as Shakespeare did. But if you dismantle Shakespeare's precise structure and rhythm, you must substitute one of your own, and a cinematic one at that (this is why Welles' films are the greatest Shakespeare adaptations, because they are pure Welles). Traymor does not, and so her film, for all its inventiveness, feels lopsided, moments of power alternating with more ponderous ones, dramatic effect diluted.
Similarly, Shakespeare's rich imagery - of the body, reading and writing, surface and underground etc. - is largely forsaken, but nothing very systematic put in its place. I don't mean to carp - most people who go to these filmed plays won't have time to read the play, and so the words will fly over them (as they usually do for me). Visual impact is all, and this is infinitely more preferable to Branagh. The conflation of different periods, costumes, locations - classical, fascist, modern, Hollywood etc. - is pure Shakespeare, and offers some startling effects, especially the toy soldiers beginning.
The acting is fine, even if, snob that I am, the American voice jars among the rest. Once again, as throughout the play's history, the relatively secondary role of Aaron steals it, with Traymor mercifully not trying, through misguided political correctness, to sanitise his gleeful evil. Elliot Goldenstahl's score is a remarkable work of pastiche.