Herald rating: * *
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Colm Feore
Director: Julie Taymor
Rating: R16 (violence, horror scenes)
Running time: 160 mins
Opens: Thursday at Village Queen St, Rialto
Review: Peter Calder
Widely regarded as one of Shakespeare's lesser works - first drafts of roles such as Lear and Iago - and certainly among the least-performed, Titus Andronicus is so uncompromisingly bloodsoaked that at times it seems like an Elizabethan equivalent of a slasher movie.
In its central and most celebrated act of carnage, two men rape a young woman, then cut out her tongue (so she won't be able to identify them) and lop off her hands.
Her father's revenge is to mince them up and serve them in a pie to their unsuspecting mother.
Director Taymor, who brought Disney's The Lion King to the stage (and directed this play off-Broadway before mounting the screen production), wants us to see the play as "the greatest treatise on violence ever written."
But such analytical substance, if it is there at all, would be hard to find, swamped as it is with oceans of her ostentatiously theatrical style.
The portents are bad when she opens on a boy playing with toy soldiers - the facile attempt to implicate the modern viewer is both unsubtle and faintly condescending - but by the time we are pitched into the horrific battle of wills between the decorated general (Hopkins) of the title and the seductive Goth Queen Tamora (Lange) much worse is under way.
The film is such a stylistic lucky dip that we hardly know whether to laugh or cry - and we are seldom, even at the worst, moved to flinch.
Alan Cumming's Saturninus is dressed for the Hero Parade; Tamora's two murderous sons look like they stepped out of a rock video; Hopkins' Titus seems a creation of Lina Wertmuller or perhaps even Eisenstein; Lange's Tamora is a fevered Fassbinder dream.
So when Feore, as Lavinia's uncle Marcus, comes upon his hacked-up niece, and he's wearing the kind of toga they might have used to outfit a small-town rep player, it's a blessed relief and we can hear him speak the poetry.
Hopkins lends his role a lot more dignity than it might have deserved, but Lange seems more skittish than evil.
This, in the end, is definitely Shakespeare for devotees rather than filmgoers.
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