by Linda Tiessen Wiebe

TITUS (1999) JUMPS OFF the screen and into your gut from the beginning. There is something chilling about the young boy playing war with his action figures as his own city is bombed in the background. It's not the precariousness of his situation; it’s the revealing way in which his play mirrors the front page news we all know. The boy is bloodthirsty.

We are catapulted from this scene into the center of a Roman coliseum. We meet the soldiers in their bloody, muddy return from war. Their syncopated, choreographed march and the synchronized thrust of the sword-in-gauntlet is chilling. They are a machine. This is how we first meet Titus, a victorious general mourning his lost sons. Powerful, respected, mighty.

Titus is a man who lives by the code of Rome. Rome must be honoured and will, in turn, honour him. He follows this code methodically and blindly, even to the point of killing his own son for protecting his sister. He has lived his whole life by this code and will not deviate even for filial ties. This is why he can glibly sentence the son of Tamora, the captured Goth Queen, to a meaningless religious rite requiring human sacrifice. The code dictates that religions of the conquered shall be honoured. Blind to Tamora’s pleas for mercy, Titus dispatches the code. He is Rome’s first son, and when the Emperor suddenly dies, the people cry for Titus to be their new leader. Titus is Rome.

Having given his life to Rome and its wars, Titus now desires to retire in well-deserved peace with his family. But he is oblivious to the power and greed that wreak havoc on the conquered and fuel internal intrigue. Saturninus, the late Emperor’s son, contending for the throne, is suspicious of Titus’ popularity and soon turns on him. When Titus loses his sons to treachery and his daughter Lavinia to rape, all at the hands of jealous Saturninus and vengeful Tamora, he gradually realizes this is simply the machine of Rome running its course. When Rome is unfeeling, Titus enters rationality and calmly begins to plot his revenge. He is no longer blind to the myth of power and loyalty.

Titus’ rationality is better than his blind instinct of following the order and honour of Rome. But it still leads him to repeat the vengeance cycle. His eyes have been opened to the horror of what he has served. He plans a brilliant, chilling revenge, seeing through the machinations of Tamora. But Titus dies before he can learn the lesson that revenge never delivers the satisfaction it promises.

The machinations of Aaron the moor, Tamora’s servant and lover, are behind most of the sorrow in the play. He is a proud man who takes vain pleasure in coldly calculating crimes against people. When captured, he shows no remorse but rather a strange exultation in his evil. The only thing that moves his heart is the birth of his son. While claiming to be an atheist himself, Aaron entreats Lucius’ faith in order to procure safety for the boy. Without admitting guilt, Aaron unwittingly acknowledges that the ways of his life lead to fruitlessness. New life must be entrusted to another ethos.

While Titus doesn’t live to follow suit, his son and grandson do. The boy has seen the glory of the Roman honour code destroy his family. He has watched the lunacy of revenge destroy the mind of his ancestor. He has witnessed the havoc caused by greed and envy in the power-seeking machinations of Tamora and Saturninus. In a poignant moment, he buys small wooden hands from a toy-maker so that his young aunt may regain the hands she lost to the Goths’ violence.

The imagery is gripping: Saturninus’ sinister Nazi-like Mercedes and uniform, the garish party room with licentious, inflatable fish-women, the gigantic brass wolf-head adorning the throne room, the paltry twigs sickenly mocking Lavinia’s absent hands. The music partners this imagery. Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius, are accompanied by raucous, grating punk rock. The brothers Saturninus and Bassianus play court to insidiously giddy jazz. Titus’ return to Rome is marked by an ancient, drum-syncopated march. Each generation has its own flavour of madness.

The characters are penetratingly portrayed. Anthony Hopkins is the master of playing both power-obsession and madness. Alan Cumming renders a chilling young Saturninus, his lean face matching a chiselled incarnation. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Matthew Rhys are far too convincing as the ruthless Goth boys, Chiron and Demetrius. Jessica Lange crafts a liquid blend of cunning and revenge as Tamora, their mother.

It’s a haunting movie because it reveals a darkness that shadows all of us. The film’s director, Julie Taymor, says that she “loved doing this play, but hated what the play was about.” In flashes of lightning clarity, you recognize humanity, if not yourself, in this drama. Filmed on location in Bosnia, Baltic images superimpose themselves throughout the movie. But more sinister, it reveals the “daily civil war in the kitchen of who will serve and who will eat” to paraphrase Leonard Cohen. Given over to our instincts for domination and satiation, Shakespeare paints a dire picture of the human race. There is violence in living by convention; there is violence in living by instinct. It is only when reason allows us eyes made young that we have the luxury of choice.

And so, after Titus has fed Tamora a pie made of her dead son’s brains and is slain for skewering her with a candelabra; when Lavinia, whose honour and will to live fled long before, finally finds peace in death; when all these dead lie scattered about; when the boy now appears in the coliseum as his father is crowned emperor, and we dimly see the faces of spectators looking vaguely modern, hauntingly Baltic; when the baby of the moor is held up as the spawn of evil; when it seems likely that violence will once more beget violence, the boy takes the child in his arms. And there is a small candle of hope. From the lessons of his grandfather and uncles, he recognizes the need for a new beginning. Not in the old Rome or the old family. Outside the coliseum, towards the sunrise, he carries the baby protectively. From smashing toy-humans to nurturing a new consciousness, the young Lucius moves us from our guts and minds to our hearts.