Coriolanus (2011)

[starlady]

Coriolanus. Dir. Ralph Fiennes, 2011.

This is such a good movie. Such a good movie. I went to see it with kuwdora and we both had no knowledge or expectations beyond "Shakespeare play that's rarely turned into a movie!" and we were both more or less blown away.

So yes, Ralph Fiennes directs this full modern-dress adaptation of an early Shakespeare effort, and it's amazing. Unlike Julie Taymor's Titus, which is another excellent adaptation of less than Grade A Shakespeare (and another adaptation featuring a nearly-silent boy character who becomes important at the end), this movie is entirely consistent in both its setting and its design, and it's flat-out great the way that obviously BBC-esque newscasters can deliver updates on the TV in full Shakespearean verse and it works. The movie is great, in fact, at integrating the play with modern communications technology, such that one of the heralds delivers his updates to Coriolanus via Skype. YES. Also, at one point the graffitti in Corioles, the urban battlefield from which the titular Caius Martius derives his name, actually was the bad Latin (illegitimi non carborundi sunt) for "Don't let the bastards get you down." A+ set and costume design, in other words!

The plot of the movie concerns the aforementioned Roman general Caius Martius and the political problem of his overweening pride--he's been taught by his mother Volumnia to spurn the plebeians and love the battlefield, so after his success on the latter brings him to the position of consul, which requires flattering the former, he's got real problems, and so does Rome, since Martius' old best-loved enemy Tullus Aufidius leads the Volsces, Rome's powerful enemy, and as the tagline goes, "Nature teaches beasts to know their friends." (Yes, this is vague, but I honestly think the play is better appreciated not knowing the twist at the end of the third act.)

The performances from the cast are uniformly stellar, though I had the weird experience of constantly thinking the actors were someone else: Is that Clive Owen playing Aufidius? No, it's Gerard Butler. Is that Maggie Smith playing Volumnia? No, it's Vanessa Redgrave. Is that Lord Voldemort playing Coriolanus? Yes, yes it is.

I'm still not sure what to make of the play. I think its obviously eastern European setting, in this movie, grounds and sobers it; I don't know what moral to find, necessarily, in the text as it stands, though of course it doesn't have to have a moral. In the meantime, it's a powerful, strange, unsettling story, rich and complicated around gender and power and politics. kuwdora and I were surely the only people laughing in the theater at the "I hate him so much, I love him!" shaving scene, though, but we couldn't help it, because the subtext is so clearly text, and you'll see why if you see the movie.

Comments

[recessional]

though of course it doesn't have to have a moral

It's my experience that most Shakespeare doesn't, and the ones that look like they do are hiding a tricky layer of "hah! Gotcha!" under the apparent simplicity.

I was already planning to see that; it's good to know it lives up to its promise.

[starlady]

Mm, yes. I think maybe instead of "moral" I should have said "point" or "meaning," since I don't think this play is nihilistic the way Lear is, for example--but your point certainly stands, regardless.

[oracne]

I had many of the same thoughts on watching it. With the addition of thinking the soldiers-revel-and-dance-in-the-firelight scene was strikingly like a gay dance club. In a good way.

[starlady]

Yes, definitely.

[lnhammer]

Actually, it's not an early Shakespeare effort: it's probably one of his last-written tragedies, and postdates his Big Four. Which is what makes it so knotty and little-performed, of course -- much like Timon and Cymbeline, from the same time.

Good to hear about the film -- I've been looking forward to it.

---L.

[recessional]

No, I don't think it's quite like Lear (I think it'd be hard for anything to be like Lear) but I think it's one of his more naturalistic ones - much more "here is a story with some characters, let's see what they do" than "and now we are going to examine the ridiculousness of love/how the universe really doesn't care about us at all/whatever".

[starlady]

I've seen a college production of Cymbeline, but not Timon.

Huh, that makes it even more interesting. Because it is kind of like Titus, except in the mirror backwards, you know?

And yes, the movie is fantastic.

[lnhammer]

I've seen the RSC PBS productions of all three, but remember nothing of the Cs and very little of T. Timon ties with Pericles with the play I reread least often -- the last times I tried to, in fact, I couldn't finish.

I should try reading Titus and Coriolanus together.

---L.