BARD'S 'TITUS' BECOMES A VISUAL TREAT.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

``Titus,'' Julie Taymor's deliciously pulpy, gorgeously stylized and darkly inspired retelling of Shakespeare's grand guignol tragedy ``Titus Andronicus,'' is a movie that brings new meaning to the phrase ``vicious circle.''

By far the bloodiest and least performed of the Bard's early works, the play provides an excruciating account of the grisly cycle of retribution unleashed by a proud and stoic Roman general, and concludes with an unceremoniously corpse-strewn stage.

Taymor's film, as entertaining as it is visually stunning, reinterprets Shakespeare's vision as a three-ring Fellini-esque theater of cruelty laced with absurdist humor and haunting poetic imagery.

Taymor and her design team have fashioned a fully postmodern Shakespeare adaptation, with a look that ranges from Bronze Age chic to leather-pants punk. The excellent ensemble cast, headed by Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange, also succeeds against stiff odds, finding soulfulness and coherency in some of Shakespeare's most repugnant and psychologically splintered rogues.

Reviled and ignored for centuries, ``Titus Andronicus'' was rediscovered after a landmark 1955 production at Stratford-upon-Avon proved its enduring relevance to a planet racked by two world wars.

Yet although it's packed with the kind of lurid sensationalism and meat-grinder aesthetics that might endear it to our own jaded times, the play is still a tough sell. Rape, maiming, murder and even cannibalism make up its almost surreal quotient of violence. Vengeance and hate are served raw, without the mellowing tonic of Hamlet's bitter eloquence or Lear's majestic madness.

``Titus,'' however, refuses to take the play's seemingly nihilistic atrocities simply at face value. Diving headfirst where most debut filmmakers might fear to paddle, Taymor, whose career encompasses opera, avant-garde theater and Disney's stage version of ``The Lion King,'' makes a persuasive case that ``Titus'' is, if not a great play, then at least an unnervingly relevant one that prefigures Shakespeare's greatest tragedies.

Neither more nor less brutal than most men of his station, Titus (Hopkins) is a by-the-book professional warrior recently returned from conquering the Goths and enslaving their rebel queen Tamora (the tigresslike Lange) and her three feral sons, one of whom Titus immediately sacrifices to appease the Roman gods.

Naturally, no good will come of this. By ignoring Tamora's plea that ``sweet mercy is nobility's true badge,'' Titus unleashes Tamora's own formidable blood lust.

And when the Roman emperor-elect Saturninus (amusingly played by Alan Cumming as a world-weary brat) picks Tamora for his consort, Titus and his four sons, daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser) and brother Marcus (Colm Feore) are soon banished from Rome, where they're even more vulnerable to Tamora's machinations and those of her surviving sons (Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Matthew Rhys) and their fiendish ally Aaron the Moor (Harry Lennix).

It says much about the film's robust artistry that Lennix makes the Moor less the racist caricature of Shakespeare's text than an exquisitely ambivalent character, capable of both remorseless cruelty toward his foes and great tenderness toward his infant son.

In a barely less off-putting role, Lange does some of her best film work, while Hopkins' rich, intuitive performance makes sense of the consummate man of war who has little aptitude for peace. Segueing effortlessly from brutal to avuncular, the actor even provides a lip-smacking bit of comic relief when he finds the perfect occasion to evoke Hannibal Lecter.

In the first of many well-conceived set pieces, Taymor stages Titus' initial entry into the Roman coliseum as a mud-splattered pageant of robotic soldiers driving motorcycles and war machines that could've leapt from the pages of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks.

For all its primitive exoticism, the savage terrain of ``Titus,'' like so many of Shakespeare's worlds, is uncannily and disturbingly contemporary.

The facts

The film: ``Titus'' (R; violence, partial nudity, adult situations).

The stars: Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Julie Taymor and adapted by Taymor from William Shakespeare's ``Titus Andronicus.'' Photography by Luciano Tovoli. Produced by Taymor, Jody Patton and Conchita Airoldi. Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Running time: Two hours, 40 minutes.

Playing: Landmark New Wilshire.

Our rating: Three and one half stars