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Titus
Directed by Julie Taymor; starring Anthony Hopkins, Alan Cumming, Jessica Lange, Harry Lennix, Laura Fraser, James Frain, Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Kenny Doughty, Colin Wells, Blake Ritson, Colm Feore.
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In our post-Mad Max beyond The Matrix, just on plot alone Julie Taymor's Titus should be a fabulous hit. A faithful rendering of Shakespeare's most controversial play for years many uptight scholars even denied he wrote it, so lurid its plot and language it jumps out and grabs you by the throat and shakes you until you simply give up.

The plot: The Emperor of Rome dies and the Senate wants to make the great general Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins), just returning from winning a war with the Goths, the new Caesar. But Saturninus (Alan Cumming), the Emperor's son is pissed, and Titus allows him to ascend the throne. Saturninus wants to marry Titus's daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser), but she is betrothed to Bassianus (James Frain), who is Saturninus's brother. So after Titus refuses to grant her hand in marriage, Saturninus decides to marry Tamora (Jessica Lange), the evil queen of the Goths, whom Titus had brought back to Rome a slave. Oh, and he also killed her eldest son Alarbus, which pissed her off, so after she becomes queen, she urges her two living sons, Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) and Chiron (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and her lover Aaron (Harry J. Lennix) to rape and de-tongue and de-hand Lavinia and kill Bassianus, and then blame the murder on Titus's son's Quintus (Kenny Doughty) and Martius (Colin Wells). Oh, I forgot that Titus has already killed his son Mutius (Blake Ritson) to show his loyalty to Saturninus Anyway, Saturninus says that he'll free Titus's sons if the general cuts off his hand, which he does, and then the Emperor doesn't keep his word and sends back to Titus his hand as well as his son's heads. This pisses him off, and he invites Saturninus and Tamora to dinner and serves them the Goth's queen's own sons Demetrius and Chiron whom he tortured and killed and baked in a meat pie, or a "pastie" as Shakespeare delicately puts it. Well, at dinner clearly a nightmare event he kills Lavinia to restore her honor (well, it's a plan), and then Saturninus and Tamora and then himself. After all this, Marcus (Colm Feore) takes control and kills Aaron and then restores order to the empire, or at least to those that are left. Oh, and I forgot to add that Tamora and Aaron have a son, and while the baby lives, Demetrius and Chiron kill its nurse.

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What could go wrong with this mix of family values and she-done-him-wrong-and-wrong theatrics? Director Julie Taymor famed stage director noted for Broadway's many-award-winning The Lion King has brought an overwhelming level of theatricality to the play and film. Half set in some mythological version of ancient Rome, half in what looks to be Mussolini's Italy, and half in sort-of-modern-dress-with-mud-makeup (this movie is so over the top it sustains three halves), Titus is alternately powerfully resonant and lugubriously heavy-handed. Taymor never lets up, and her cast reads Shakespeare's line with wit, feeling, and energy. But the play is constantly lost in wave upon wave of gimmicky film effects. Lets face it, this isn't a plot that needs to be sold to an audience, and could have been served well by mere decent restraint.

But perhaps the worst aspect of Titus is that it is profoundly anti-sexual. Shakespeare's play is through all the gore a meditation on personal, political, and family honor. Titus "honors" a corrupt ruler over his family and personal integrity, and thus loses everything in an avalanche of guts and mayhem. But in Taymor's film it is less honor than deviant sexuality that causes the decline and fall of these Romans.

Taymor seems to have been influenced enormously by Fellini's later work particularly Satyricon and Casanova, and has taken their mostly ludicrous excesses to heart. Fellini's view of sexuality is essentially a straight teenaged boy's vision, and Taymor spends an endless amount of time showing us how bad Tamora, Saturninus, Demetrius, and Chiron are by exposing how perversely sexual.

Alan Cumming's Saturninus is made here into a foppish evil queen complete with raised twitching eyebrows and limp wrists; it is all Pee-Wee Herman without the integrity. It is also the same performance Cumming gave in Eyes Wide Shut. Saturninus's court is so corrupt they have gasp! orgies that have naked women sitting on divans eating grapes and same-sex male couples fondling one another. These look mostly like outtakes from Caligula and generate no heat and little humor. Jessica's Lang's Tamora is a hyper sexualized Cruella deVille who seems driven primarily by insatiable lust than a need for personal freedom or to avenge her son. Demetrius and Chiron are mean-spirited punks who are forever grabbing at one another's crotches and giving each other forced, fake blow-jobs. This is entertaining enough, but with no real sex there is no payoff. What is worse, however, is that all this adds up to a clear message that the bad people are ruled by sexual perversion and decadence and that the good people Titus and his brood are virtuous, noble, family-oriented, and heroic.

For all of its high theatrics and fancy film techniques, Titus is, in the end, a simple-minded morality tale that plays upon the most conventional ideas about sex and gender to hammer home its message of family values. **

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com