The greatest success director Julie Taymor has achieved with adaptation is surely her work bringing stage musical version of The Lion King to Broadway. But in 1999 she took her talents to southern Europe in adapting Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus for the screen. Now, Shakespearean adaptation is incredibly hit and miss when it comes to movies. And there’s a wide variation of approaches people take, from adapting it into something that fits a modern setting, to taking just the loosest basis of its story and reframing its characters and setting altogether, to being completely faithful reproductions of the play, to some mixture of these.
Of all the Shakespeare adaptations, I’m not sure if there’s one with more visual nourishment than Titus. The image of Anthony Hopkins alone is enough to tease a feature-length story that keeps the eyes interested throughout. The ears are kept busy as well, with music and choreographed sequences that are pretty, well, grand. I can’t say I knew much of what was happening at all in the movie and had little familiarity with the original play, but this was one movie where my rational understanding didn’t matter all that much, and I was just floored by everything I was seeing. It made visceral sense.
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