JOLLY DAYS

Taymor's Titus

Julie Taymor’s 1999 movie Titus is a dream of production design. Taymor’s alive, rich visual imagination and her academic propensity to describe ideas visually, attempting to make theory expressive, has great charm in its courage, its eager seriousness. Taymor is of the theater and has the love of artifice and surrealist illustration that fits well with the bloody dreamscape of Titus Andronicus, the least liked of Shakespeare’s work. It is an early work of Shakespeare, almost adolescent in its sensationalist violence. It’s an ugly and violent story, filled to the brimming with murder and mutilation, but has the incredible advantage of Shakesepeare’s gorgeous language, his depth of human understanding, always surprising you in leaps of stunning imagination and association — language coiled like a striking snake.

Taymor has arrogated the work to herself, making the look and feel a product of her own imagination. Taymor has adopted the dreary artifice of modernizing a historical work by setting some of the action in relatively recent history. She often uses the expression in her commentary, “I really didn’t care…”, referring to the audience’s understanding what she is presenting; this glib self-absorption pervades the movie. Her commentary on the DVD is fascinating however. She is sincerely involved with the symbolic and intellectually contradictory display she presents in the movie. I admire the chances she takes — the lengths to which she is willing to go. She knows the play well, having done it in the theater. This familiarity breeds both contempt for the storytelling function as well as great richness of presentation.

Taymor is so fond of the surface you begin to wonder if she has any depth of understanding or ability to communicate. You don’t “melt with ruth” at a Taymor production. She desires to impress and astound, a kind of visual “wall of sound”. She claims substance in every detail — where apparently every pimple means something to her — but she doesn’t grasp that “creative” ideas need to be communicated, need to be understood in a human and personal sense. She is detached, living aesthetically in the realm of decoration, of costume, of gorgeous sets and surprising imagery. There is, in sum, a lack of expressiveness that is not true to Shakespeare, and a credulous belief in theoretical symbology that doesn’t pan out — the artifice doesn’t help tell the audience the story, or give the audience the feeling to which she lays claim intellectually.