movie night

[mmcirvin]

We saw Julie Taymor's movie of Titus Andronicus. People who are put off by Quentin Tarantino's propensity for onscreen violence should probably steer clear of this one; it makes Reservoir Dogs look like the Teletubbies. Though she gives it the surrealistic gloss characteristic of modern Shakespeare stagings, Taymor really isn't playing up the killing and maiming much; it's all there in the source material.

Titus Andronicus is an early work of Shakespeare's, and it shows; none of the central characters has the degree of likeability that he gives his best tragic heroes. With the exception of a couple of peripheral characters, everyone's pretty much evil, and pretty gleeful about it. The plotting is pretty good until the least unlikeable bad guy, a black slave named Aaron who has a refreshing screw-the-universe attitude, gets caught and can no longer play everyone like a violin, and then Shakespeare has to resort to desperate goofiness to set up the famous vengeance-by-pastry scene. Seeds of Lear and Macbeth and a sort of upside-down Othello are all visible here.

Addendum: Looking at the play text, it seems to me that Aaron's preexisting social status is actually not at all clear. He was apparently hanging out with the Goths prior to the war, and Titus captured him as a hostage along with Tamora and her sons, one of whom Titus had killed as a human sacrifice. Thereafter, Aaron spends most of his time advising the remaining two sons (who are dim, hot-blooded nasties) and goading them to do stuff. In critical discussions, Aaron is usually described as a completely unmotivated villain, a guy who's just evil for no reason, and therefore an artistic flaw in Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare's own explicit reasoning seems to be that he's bad because he's an atheist. But in the Taymor production, mostly because of Harry Lennix's terrific performance in the scene where he sees and rescues the infant son he begat on Tamora (and defends blackness as a good thing to have), Aaron's omni-malevolence comes across more as the product of lifelong resentment at race-based poor treatment, and almost admirable for that. It is, of course, in part the product of resonances from the intervening 400 years of history, and some might object to it as PC revisionism, but there's some support for it in the text of that scene, and I think it improves the whole thing.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

After I saw Frida, I wanted to see other stuff by Taymor, because I loved Frida. After we switched back to cable from the DVD player, lo and behold, Titus Andronicus was on IFC. Unfortunately, it was nearly over. I MUST rent it, if for no other reason than the presence of Alan Cumming and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, actors I have loved in many other films.

So I take it that despite its shortcomings (present in Shakespeare to begin with, you seem to say), you would recommend that others watch it? What did you think of the pacing, the directing, the acting, the cinematography?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd highly recommend it if you can stomach the buckets of blood. It's a beautiful movie, full of interesting anachronisms such as the use of motorcycles and Italian Fascist architecture in the location shooting, and the acting is uniformly excellent; I particularly liked Harry Lennix as Aaron, Jessica Lange as the barbarian queen Tamora, and Cumming as the immature new emperor Saturninus.

Taymor interposes several odd and lovely hallucinatory interludes that seem a bit extraneous, but on the other hand they do provide some relief from 162 minutes of grisly murder.

The one outright bad choice is the insertion of one of those bullet-time freeze-frame revolves at the end of the climactic bloodbath; that looks terribly dated already. (The movie came out in 1999, whether before or after The Matrix I'm not sure. But the basic freeze-and-revolve used in Titus was already getting overused in music videos and TV commercials then.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

According to this review (http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/t/titus.html), Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare's biggest contemporary hit. It probably drew in the bear-baiting crowd.

makes Reservoir Dogs look like the Teletubbies

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Reservoirtubbies.

Eh-oh!