"Titus Andronicus" is objectively a terrible mess of a play, and it's a good reminder to anyone that Shakespeare was not all great, nor was he always well-received. It's his first major tragedy, and it shows; it's a disaster, with little to redeem or recommend it. Similarly, this film is a disaster, with little to redeem or recommend it.Taymor is an unquestionably talented and skilled artist, but she had not come fully enough into her own style and ability while doing this film. Excellent actors like Jessica Lange and Anthony Hopkins are wasted in directionless roles that are clumsily moved from one point to another, and very little connects anything into coherency of any kind. The movie comes off mainly as extremely self-indulgent, full of things that only Taymor wanted to see, and nothing much else. It smacks of a vanity project, making it all the easier to resent due to the waste of great actors. At its best, it comes off as clunky, aping Peter Greenaway's vastly superior work on his adaptation Prospero's Books.The thing about Greenaway is that even in an adaptation of a simple enough play of Shakespeare's, he managed to bring a different perspective and vast sensory engagement. Taymor, here, shuffles through an intolerably bad play and brings nothing at all novel to the table, but every part of the production acts like it's something never before seen. Even Reign: The Conqueror was a far better production along these same fundamental storytelling lines, bringing so much new and engaging even if elements of its story were not particularly good. Closer to the material, Derek Jarman's take on "The Tempest" also brought modern elements and accessibility to an aged work and proved that Shakespeare could still be daring and even avant-garde, hundreds of years later.It's unimaginable that anyone could really enjoy this, especially as it vastly overstays its welcome at an over-two-hours running time. None of the characters are sympathetic, and the only slightest charm brought to any of the proceedings comes from the actors...neither direction nor script contribute much of anything to the proceedings. Frankly, starting off with an obnoxious modern child and clashing with the pseudo-historical setting of the story was a massive mistake. Don't cultivate resistance from your audience straight off the bat, not in "Titus Andronicus" -- they're going to hate the characters and the story anyway, and irritating them from minute one is a poor choice.It's admirable to have the ambition that this adaptation takes. It's just that Taymor is only ambitious enough to tackle the project, not enough to actually do anything with it. Her anachronistic touches are lazy and don't work most of the time, as well as taking away what little meaning the play originally had with its specific context. She's simultaneously too married to the play and not attached enough to it, in favor of what she imagines is a dazzling artistic message. The problem here is that most people never experience "Titus Andronicus", and that's because it's one of Shakespeare's absolute worst: cartoonish, clumsy, laughable, and a base attempt to crowd-please. But she never manages to bother making the story accessible to an audience likely to be unfamiliar with it, made even more difficult by literally none of the characters being written sympathetically or even interestingly. It's every bit as poor in her presentation, because even the best actors can't pull something out of so much nothing. It's still hilariously bad, even in its most dramatic, tragic moments, and it's not a joke people are missing the humor of or a tremendous wit: it's just a poorly-written play that fails in everything it sets out to do.The production overall suffers, as no version of this I could find had any decent sound to it. Lines are mumbled and drowned out in parts, blathered incomprehensibly in others. The soundtrack dwarfs everything else sometimes, and at other times it barely registers. Whoever was responsible for sound, I hope they've learned how to do actual sound production since 1999. Likewise, costumes are as easy to criticize as any of Taymor's well-known work: they're either lazy and boring or ridiculous and impractical, but not in an engaging enough manner to forgive them. They all also scream "costume", no matter what the scene or character.If you want to watch a good Shakespeare-inspired film, watch Prospero's Books. If you want to watch Taymor do Shakespeare well, watch her version of The Tempest. If you want to watch a good, straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare, watch the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. But under no circumstances should you watch Titus. It will cure you of your delusions about Shakespeare's greatness and, if you have any affection for the actors involved, depress or anger you with the resentment of someone doing nothing so much as wasting their time. It's a waste of these actors' time, and it's a waste of the viewers' time. And that, especially in art or entertainment, is unforgivable.

This is a handsome, sorrowful, flourishing, heavyhanded retelling of Shakespeare. I went for a walk afterwards and it felt cleansing to breathe in the cool night air after all the despair and hate of this. Much of it comes down to the play itself. It is bloody and mad, heavyhanded itself. A gloried general who puts Rome above his sons. A vengeful mother and queen who will not return pity when she was given scorn. A pathetic king, a monstrous moor, and various sons and daughters as playthings for the mad.It is clumsy in spots. The whole ruse in the forest with slain Bassianus must have felt far fetched to even Shakespeare. And a Roman general who slips out and returns against Rome with an army of the Goths he helped vanquish a few months ago? But overall it is powerful, gripping stuff because it's in the right hands here.The question how to visualize Shakespeare must be as old as the medium. The filmmaker here made a simple concession. Keep the original language. This means she can't film the metaphor, which would make a superb film of itself. Her brilliant choice was to create a modern stage for it. A Roman orgy plays out like a party from the roaring 20s. Cars and cigarettes coexist with tunics and armor. But the main thrust is still cthonic and medean.We don't have a calligraphic weave where character urges appear as encounter. But she has managed to address another, equally difficult problem of cinematic narrative. So many films are a passive exchange. What she has done in this odd way is carve a vital space for the story that avoids the pitfalls of both the usual period piece and on the opposite end the arbitrary imagination of something like the Cremaster films.It jars for a while but settles as a coherent world that is different enough to demand attention to it. It feels alive, freed from a historic stage, neither realistic nor without reality, puzzling the logical thought (why cars?) yet remaining implicitly recognizable for the eye.And yet it's all that rich, image-based language of the original that I find myself drawn to.In Shakespeare's time, plays were apparently performed with only bare essentials of stage craft. I know very little about him and the time, but this film surprised me enough to want to change that. Anyway, the word carried the cinematic stitch, the visual horizons. Here we have both word and stream of images, which may dampen the impact of the first. Yet I urge you to really pay attention to the word here, always in conjunction with the story. On the top dramatic layer we have sin and madness. Deep down, though, it is all about realizing what is truly vital and matters in life: intuition, not structure. It is not the loss of queendom for her, nor for Titus the loss of prestige that truly hurt. What Titus deprives of the Goth queen and is turn torn from him tenfold is this human background of connection to loved ones that we often take for granted as we plot careers, this being love. Not the same as passion, it is exactly the sense I have when I feel happy, the spontaneous assurance provided by things, the deep anchorage in the world that can only come from caring about things other than myself.This is not poetry, but mechanics of awareness. Being happy and whole entails a sense of rootedness in the world around me.The play is stitched throughout with metaphors about exactly this: the earth accepting rain, trees blowing in the wind, gnats flying in front of the sun, rivers overflowing their banks, branches, deer, earth, rain. Wonderful, wonderful cinematic flows in words. It is not the word itself that appeals, the literary quality. The word carries the insight, capacity for horizon. All cull from nature the same observation, the same motif. Transient, violent motion yet always anchored in the world with capacity to bear it.My world is Taoist, out of personal choice, worlds apart from Shakespeare. I am always riveted by his work but need that cleansing walk afterwards that restores things. And yet here I find him drawn to the same realization as the Chinese masters in their meditation, that of a (perceptive) field beyond suffering and nonsuffering where things hold each other in place by virtue of being what they are.Shakespeare's Tao.

Titus, a Roman general (played by Anthony Hopkins), finds his world falling apart around him when a scorned enemy, Tamora (Jessica Lange) gains the power to exact revenge against him. At his lowest point Titus begins to plan his own even more terrible revenge against Tamora who shows no sign of stopping her tormenting him.The story, set in a timeless almost fantasy like Rome, is more gruesome than Hamlet (1996), another Shakespeare film with a theme based on revenge. Tamora's revenge is terrible and is aimed mostly at Titus' family. She has two of Titus' sons framed and executed for murder and his daughter raped, her hands and tongue cut off because as he says "He that wounded her hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead." She also has Titus cut his own hand off in the false hope that his two sons will be spared. There is a lot of focus on children and family in the use of revenge and Titus' revenge is no different, he serves Tamora her own two sons baked into a pie, which she eats in front of him and seems to enjoy.Julie Taymor uses dramatic costumes to help portray the personalities of the characters the costumes are all a mix of Classical, Elizabethan, and the more modern World War Two German uniforms. Particularly interesting is Saturnus' (Allan Cumming) costumes. Most of his costumes have features from World War Two Germany and his hair cut is an exaggerated version of Hitler's, he wears the effeminate make up of men from the 1920's the whole effect portraying him as a sniveling but vengeful and dangerous dictator.The use of symbolism is also strong throughout the movie. One notable scene is just after Tamora has pleaded to Saturnus of Titus' innocence. She pauses to look at Titus and the image of flames arise between them, then the burning limbs of a statue representing the limbs of her first born son that Titus had cut off and burned and finally a statue's torso bearing the same mark as Titus used to mark her son. This gives Tymora reason to hate Titus and plan her revenge. Another good use of symbolism is the scene where Lavinia, Titus' daughter relives her rape. Tamora's two sons represented as tigers pounce on Lavinia wearing a white dress that is blowing up reminiscent of the famous Marylin Monroe scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955). This moment is where Titus likewise begins to plan his revenge.Revenge is best served cold but the characters that indulge in terrible revenge in this movie all wind up dead, consumed by the destructive nature of their sense of justice.

After watching Julie Taymor's screen adaptation of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Titus, I can now understand why so many people feel alienated and baffled by Shakespeare's excellent plays and why in many cases they believe them to be the province of a pretentious pseudo intellectual elite. For myself, having read the play several times, but never fortunate enough to see it, I was disappointed to see this stunning play sullied by gimmicks delivered without tasteful discretion. Surely the Bard's brilliance speaks for itself? However, yet again I'm bearing witness to a production where the directorial decisions appear to be serving personal ego rather than gifted artistic integrity.The context of the play is ancient Rome, yet the viewer is treated to a hotchpotch of clumsy visions filched from various time periods, to name but one example stylised Roman Legionaries - impressive in themselves – but then motorbikes and cars! Whatever happened to the beauty of straightforward, clear simplicity? Shakespeare was a genius, remembered and admired to this day because of the universality of his themes, brilliance of his characterisations and his awesome way with words. Scarily, Julie Taymor thinks she's better than him - or perhaps she know's she's not and is simply creating a smokescreen. The soundtrack frequently drowns out speeches; obviously what the characters are saying is not as important as Julie Taymor's crass visuals! Imagine the crassness of Lavinia (raped and mutilated off-stage) by psychedelic tigers. I'm torn between saying "Emperor's New Clothes" and just plain embarrassing.However it is the misdirection of the actors that is my main gripe and the film's major flaw. With the exception of Anthony Hopkins and James Frain who valiantly bring a degree of sincerity and believability to their performances, the film is rife with overacting, incoherent gabling and in many cases amateurish performances – Jessica Lange, Matthew Rhys and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers are particularly culpable - the unfortunate product of an untalented director and actors who are for the most part out of their depth and have no idea what they are talking about! A wasted opportunity and a crime that is all too frequently committed!