Coriolanus – review
In his directorial debut Ralph Fiennes has created a vivid, intelligent Coriolanus with powerful political relevance
But now we have Ralph Fiennes’s bloody and bold directorial debut, Coriolanus, magnificently filmed in a present-day setting. This is the first time Shakespeare’s last tragedy has been brought to the screen, though there is a memorable reference in Cole Porter’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in Kiss Me, Kate (“If she states your behaviour is heinous/ Kick her right up the Coriolanus”). It’s a tough, uningratiating play that has fascinated writers as different as TS Eliot and Bertolt Brecht. A deeply, divisively political work, devoid of comic relief and short on endearing characters, its complex moral conflicts are as knotty as the verse. Despite the absence of any popular demand from the audience, it demands to be produced regularly and actors wish to be tested in the role.
Fiennes played the part a dozen years ago at the cavernous Gainsborough film studio in Islington, north London just before it was demolished and, either because of the venue’s size or the scope of the production, he was glacially impressive rather than what he is in the film, ferociously commanding. Shot in Serbia and reeking of the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia, the film is as up to date as today’s news, and indeed it opens as if we had just switched on the TV to watch the latest bulletin from a say torn by civil strife. Here before us is Jon Snow himself as a newscaster, talking Shakespeare’s blank verse turned into breaking news and interviewing Roman experts on the current events for Fidelis TV. The hungry plebeians in jeans and bomber jackets are staging an uprising, demanding that the greedy, overfed patricians release corn from their warehouses. The quietly reasonable senator Menenius (Brian Cox) urges restraint, but his close friend the military leader Caius Martius (Ralph Fiennes) gives the crowd a tongue-lashing, and the police, their wall of shields resembling a Roman testudo, drive the mob away. It takes a war against the Volscian enemy to divert internal threats into external danger, and after the successful battle at Corioles, Caius Martius is given the honorific title “Coriolanus”.
For Corioles you might read the Falklands, Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya, and the battle is shot by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd with the dusty, hazardous documentary-style realism he has brought to movies by Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass, and to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Coriolanus becomes a national hero, but he is incapable of wooing the public because of his honesty, disdain for flattery and inability to compromise. The craven tribunes of the people (brilliantly played as shifty political opportunists by Paul Jesson and James Nesbitt) demand his banishment, and he is driven into exile. There he forms an alliance against Rome with his deadly Volscian enemy Aufidius (Gerard Butler), the guerrilla fighter with whom he shares a warrior’s code and a homoerotic attraction. From this decision tragedy inevitably ensues, as he fails to live up to the necessary ruthlessness his actions demand.
Ralph FiennesDramaWilliam ShakespeareWar filmsAction and adventureJames NesbittVanessa RedgravePhilip French
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Submited at Sunday, January 22nd, 2012 at 1:00 am on Entertainment by chuck
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