Feb. 01, 2012 - Issue #850: Godot

Coriolanus

Shakespeare on film

A ferocious, if not PTSD-addled, warrior returns home from triumph on the battlefield and finds his temperament unsuited to a life of shaking hands with fellow politicians and making pretty speeches to civilians. He lives for the fight, not the glory. His contempt for the plebes—"fragments" is what he calls them—is matched only by his adoring respect for his arch enemy—"a lion I am proud to hunt"—and, most curiously, for his mom, one hell of a trench cheerleader, who worships her son's wounds, which she, rather than the warrior's wife, nurses. "Every gash was an enemy's grave," she proudly declares. But will the public follow mom in her adoration? Or will the conquering hero come home only to be shunned away, and perhaps driven to take up arms against them?

This bleary, booming, bracing and bloody adaptation-update of Coriolanus, the directorial debut of Ralph Fiennes, scripted by co-producer John Logan, is set (à la John Osbourne's unproduced theatrical adaption) in "a place calling itself Rome," though it was filmed in Belgrade and resembles any number of contemporary war zones, with cameras and televisions everywhere you turn. This blurring of place is handled pretty effectively, thanks in large part to smart production design and costumes, not to mention the handheld, often suitably disorienting cinematography (courtesy of The Hurt Locker's Barry Ackroyd) and brilliant editing (by Before the Rain's Nicolas Gaster). But this vague-yet-familiar setting is also characteristic of the esthetic tug-of-war between grounding specificity and that chronically misleading notion called "universality" that dominates Coroilanus and plagues so many attempts to bring Shakespeare to the screen (or for that matter, though to a lesser degree, the stage).

Fiennes' performance as Coriolanus is hard to argue with. His phrasing is riveting and the character is anyway kind of nuts, a quality Fiennes has never had trouble embodying. When he flips out in public, slobbering, squishy-faced and hollering, and does it so articulately that, you know, I buy it. The rest of the gang, not so much. Gerard Butler as Tullus Aufidius, Coriolanus' foe/brother-in-arms, is just one of numerous castmembers who attempt to wed heightened text to a naturalistic conveyance of intentions, and the the result feels awkward as often as not.
  vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus