Titus

A previous version of this article was published in The Boston Review

Coming off her critical and commercial success with The Lion King on Broadway, Julie Taymor's ambitious Titus has been a major box office disappointment. For her first feature length film she boldly chose Titus Andronicus — the first and, by academic consensus, least of Shakespeare's tragedies. Taymor plunged headfirst into its blood and gore, with no compromises for philistine moviegoers or the faint of heart. Her savage depictions, all based on the text, make an easy target for condescending critics who also get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to trash the Bard of Avon. Seizing that moment, one reviewer opined that Shakespeare's play was a “crapulent piece of effluvium,” and wondered why it had not been a major career setback. The critic damned Taymor's filmmaking in similar Latinate obloquy.

When I professed my unqualified admiration for the film to a Hollywood producer, he gave me his best bottom-line snicker and said, “Oh! So you're the one.” The Los Angeles Times' film critic panned Titus as a “giant meat grinder making hash of everything it depicts.” And the snickering producer assured me that the smart money was never on Taymor.

Titus may disappoint its financial backers, but for, me Julie Taymor's version of Titus Andronicus is a milestone artistic achievement, both as film and as Shakespeare interpretation. Nor am I alone in this judgment. Ray Greene, founding editor of Boxoffice Online, described it as “the single most visually dazzling movie of the last half decade.” Jonathan Forman, of The New York Post, wrote that the film “makes a brilliant case that it is the Shakespeare play for our time, a work of art that speaks directly to the age of Rwanda and Bosnia.”

Shakespeare is the Mount Everest of western civilization, and for a hundred years filmmakers have tried to climb it. Depending on how one counts, there have been no fewer than 275 film versions of Shakespeare's plays. Perhaps no one per