No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown Finale: The one based on the worst Shakespeare play

 

 

Title: Titus

What Year?: 1999 (copyright)/ 2000 (US release)

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Disqualified!!!

 

In the course of this feature, one thing that’s taken me by surprise is that there have only been a couple movies I disqualified, defined in advance as films I would not give a viewing by my own “rules”, and then for different reasons than might be expected. There was the Gobots movie, which simply wasn’t available at a price I would pay, and Creepers (now subject of one of my videos), which pushed my patience enough that I skipped through a significant part of it. Most tellingly, there have been a few movies on my radar that I know I wouldn’t watch in full for reasons that don’t necessarily reflect their quality. With the present review, I come to the most notable example, a film that was never my thing yet still interested me. Here is Titus, the big-budget Hollywood production of the most infamous play in history.

Our story begins with a boy playing soldiers, which soon is interrupted by apparently real destruction. We then jump to the armies of Rome, who for some reason have guns and motorcycles that we see occasionally, and the general Titus, who returns with a captured barbarian queen Tamora. To avenge the death of his own son, of which he boasts over 20, he kills Tamora’s firstborn without dealing with her or two more sons who we will see definitely shouldn’t be left to their own devices. Complications come when the new emperor sets his mind on marrying Titus’s daughter Lavinia, a scheme the general goes along with so enthusiastically that he kills one of his remaining sons for standing up for her current fiancée. By the time Titus has sorted things out, the emperor instead chooses Tamora as his bride. She quickly schemes with her sons and her servant Aaron to ruin Titus’s family. It’s all just the beginning of a saga of murder, retribution, violation and mutilation, and revenge is a dish you definitely should not accept from the guy who played Hannibal Lecter!

Titus was a 1999 film written and directed by Julie Taymor, based on the play Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare. It was the first cinematic adaptation of the work, an early work believed to have been popular with contemporary audiences but later condemned as the worst of Shakespeare’s plays to survive. The film starred Anthony Hopkins as Titus and Jessica Lange (see 1976 King Kong) as Tamora, with Laura Fraser as Lavinia and Harry Lennix as the Moor Aaron. The film was accepted for distribution by Fox Searchlight; however, the film received significant cuts and a delayed release after the MPAA gave it an NC-17 rating. An R-rated version of the film was given a limited US theatrical release in early 2000, following screenings at 2 theaters in December 1999. The film was an unquestioned commercial failure, earning a box office of under $3 million against a reported $18M budget despite favorable reviews. It was released on home video, both in the R-rated and “unrated” cuts. It was reported unavailable for streaming through at least early 2020. As of mid-2022, it is offered on the Roku platform.

For my experiences, I grew up going to the local Shakespeare company, so inevitably, I knew of Titus Andronicus at a fairly early age. In my further recollections, there was a revival and partial rehabilitation of the play within the Shakespearean community in the 1990s. It was indeed a perfect expression of the growing “so bad it’s good” aesthetic. Where scholars had once sought for justification to deny whether Shakespeare even wrote the damn thing, the new wave freely played up its gory absurdities. Regretfully, I never saw any of these performances myself, but I heard more than enough to be intrigued when word of a genuine Hollywood treatment came out. Of course, the rest of the story is that the movie itself was never really allowed to arrive, for reasons that were probably justified for the “mainstream” of the time. For my part, I honestly wasn’t interested enough to run it down until I started this feature, which was when I became fully aware of the extent to which it has been censored and suppressed. I finally went in enough to pay a modest sum for the DVD, then sat on it long enough to round out the “countdown”. I have to say, my immediate reaction was that I had not missed out.

Moving in, the most difficult thing about a project like this is judging how much is a matter of the adaptation or built-in from the source material. Titus himself is a pretty clear example of the latter. As a matter of plot, he’s pretty much a bystander in his own story, which correspondingly limits Hopkins’ performance. Worse, his treatment of his own family is so atrocious that he’s less sympathetic to any modern sensibility than outright villains like Shylock or Macbeth. The collateral damage is that we rarely get a sense of Hopkins having fun with this, until he dons the chef’s outfit for the finale. (I can’t believe that this is not a reference to his most famous performance…) Strangely, we don’t get a lot from Lange as Tamora, either. The real interest comes from the strange triad of the Moor and the Goth’s sons. The princes are interchangeably feral, ultimately no more evil than high school jocks with more opportunity for mayhem. In Aaron, on the other hand, we have self-aware sociopathy on the level of Iago, with even more racial baggage. The most surreal part is that they actually function together after a fashion, despite if not because of Aaron’s mindboggling confession.

Meanwhile, the bigger problems that become evident are in its inconsistencies. This is most obvious with the intentional anachronisms, which are exactly the kind of thing you get from mainstream filmmakers trying to adopt genre concepts. The “right” ways to do this are to stick to one real or assumed period and setting, like Battle Beyond The Stars, or create a developed and consistent world where quasi-historical and modern/ futuristic tech coexist for logical reasons, like Krull or Wizards. Here, what we have is just a mess, even compared to Wizards' motley mixed media. (Dear Logos, you know we’re in trouble when I use Ralph Bakshi as a “good” example.) There’s a kind of momentum when the emperor-to-be and his cronies ride through town on cars and motorcycles accompanied by 1920s jazz/ swing, which tellingly all fit within a Weimar setting and “look”. But the bulk of the film stays with the Roman trappings, making the anachronisms merely minor affectations. I absolutely link this to the film’s wild tonal whiplash. You can see the outlines of a “so bad it’s good” tale here, but it’s repeatedly disrupted by the graphic content and especially the hyper-realistic effects. Needless to say, this is especially true of the assault on Lavinia, which is so uncomfortable in dialogue alone that I preemptively skipped well before I felt I had “seen” anything. Having done so, I can say all the more confidently that the horrific aftermath serves the story as well as anything that could have been shown directly.

That leaves the “one scene”, and for all the strangeness in the adaptation, the most truly surreal moment is straight from the Bard. In the third act (the disc menus apparently follow the play well enough), Titus and the family have dinner, already minus a number of body parts. When Lavinia refuses to eat, her father consoles her, demonstrating that he can understand her gestures. It’s interrupted by an exclamation from his grandson, who explains that he has killed a fly. Hopkins gives a high point of his performance as the mad general goes into an inexplicable rage, declaring that the boy has killed an “innocent” who “with his pretty buzzing came to make merry with us”, and further laments for the fly’s grieving family. (I checked all of this against the original text.) The boy counters that it was “a black, ill-favored fly”, and makes a further comparison to a certain character. Titus promptly commends the boy for his deed, even striking at the bug. It’s all silly enough that Lavinia joins in the laughter. Finally he muses, "We are not yet brought so low that we cannot between us kill a fly..." It’s a weird scene that’s really as dark as anything else if you think about it, yet it’s as entertaining as a story this bonkers should be all the way through.

In conclusion, this is one where I truly feel out of things to say. The one thing I find fit to add is that the 1990s were a period as full of strange experimentation as any other decade. The present movie was a fitting end to the decade, century and millennia, as an effort that would surely have been quite different if it was made at all 10 years before or 10 years after. The culminating irony is the clear effort of the mainstream studio system to sweep it from the public mind, as academia once tried to discount and dismiss the play itself. It’s an imperfect effort, still fitting for its source, and I will be the first to say that the one thing it doesn’t deserve is to be forgotten. With that, I can bring my own chapter to a close. “I have done thy mother!”