This is an interesting entry to write, because Julie Taymor is better known for her achievements as a theater director than as a feature film director, and she's only qualifying for this writeup because I'm counting recorded stage productions as part of her filmography. Still, there's nobody who makes movies like Julie Taymor, with her particular blend of mixed media, stagecraft influences, elaborate production design, and experimental elements. Her film directing debut was a TV movie, "Fool's Fire," possibly the best puppet film ever made. However, the first of her features that I saw was "Titus," a very bloody adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus." A few decades later, I'm still processing it.
There was a resurgence of Shakespearean cinema in the late 1990s, mostly spurred by Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo+Juliet" and the Kenneth Branagh adaptations. "Titus" is part of this trend, a star-studded, wildly over-the-top piece of phantasmagoria that added surreal "penny dreadful" fantasy sequences, a framing device from a child's POV, and glaring anachronisms to the lurid revenge story. The setting is now a combination of Ancient Rome and the Fascist Italy of the 1930s, with gorgeous sets straight out of a Fellini film - and that's no surprise, given that "Titus" was shot at Cinecitta Studios with some of Fellini's old collaborators involved. Despite this, "Titus" sticks very close to the original text, and retains the Shakespeare's dialogue. Anthony Hopkins also grounds the film, giving a striking performance as Titus Andronicus with all the gravity and weight you'd expect of any tragic Shakespearean figure. Well, until the last act, where he goes mad and gives into the camp at just the right moment.
"Titus Andronicus" has long been one of the less popular and least well-regarded Shakespeare plays because of its gruesome nature, featuring multiple deaths, maimings, sexual violence, and even cannibalism. "Titus" leans into the morbid and prurient content, stylizing the worst acts into Grand Guignol spectacle. The metaphorical is made literal, and the literal is often abstracted into the psychedelic. What initially drew me to the film were the wild costuming choices, with Jessica Lange in a literal crown of kitchen knives as the spirit of Revenge, Alan Cumming in Mussolini dress uniforms and leopard prints as the smug Emperor, and Laura Fraser's brutalized Lavinia sporting tree branches in the place of severed limbs. Anthony Hopkins appears in a chef's outfit for the cannibalism scenes, naturally. Not all of this works, with the lengthy closing shot of a character walking off into the distance pinging as especially indulgent and pretentious, but it's a thrill to see someone engage with the play with this amount of earnest passion and rigor. "Titus" remains the definitive screen adaptation of "Titus Andronicus," because nobody has been brave enough to try anything remotely as ambitious with it since. I also suspect it went a long way toward popularizing and rehabilitating "Titus Andronicus" with modern audiences.
Taymor originally staged "Titus Andronicus" in 1994 as an Off-Broadway show, in the middle of an impressive run of theater projects that included the operas "Oedipus Rex" and "Salome," and the musical adaptation of "The Lion King." The acclaim from "The Lion King" is almost certainly why Taymor got to direct "Titus," and was able to assemble such a high calibre cast and crew for it. Nearly all of the film's defining artistic choices and imagery came from the stage production - the costuming, the video projections of nightmare imagery, and plenty of graphic violence. Taymor has claimed that she was drawn to the play because she found it so relevant to the modern era. Some of the characters certainly stand out as ahead of their time, especially the Moor, Aaron, played by Harry Lennix as a notably complex villain. She also expands the role of Young Lucius, a minor character, in order to highlight the cycles of violence, generational trauma, and revenge begetting revenge.
I've enjoyed Julie Taymor's subsequent films, especially "Frida," but none of them have resonated with me like "Titus." I suspect it's because underneath all the extremity and the flashy visuals, there's a very solid Shakespearean tragedy here, with compelling characters and strong performances. And deep down, I've always been a sucker for Shakespearean tragedies, and the few screen adaptations that really do them justice.
What I've Seen - Julie Taymor
Fool's Fire (1992)
Oedipus Rex (1993)
Salome (1995)
The Lion King (1997)
Titus (1999)
Frida (2002)
Across the Universe (2007)
The Tempest (2010)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (2014)
The Glorias (2020)
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