Coriolanus
2012: Ralph Fiennes

I confess that the contemporary trend of rendering Shakespeare “grittier” or “more realistic” by clothing the soldiers in fatigues, arming them with automatic weapons, and setting the scene in grubby, graffiti-splattered slums, is not to my way of thinking especially illuminating in respect to either Shakespeare or contemporary political reality. What Shakespeare had to say that can be applied to our modern condition may be useful, but he was saying it in somewhat more abstract terms than this kind of rendition would really suggest. The political reality of Coriolanus was more remote from Shakespeare than Shakespeare is from us, by a factor of about 4:1. Showing his forces as police in riot gear is (one supposes) trying to say something about modern police techniques more than it’s really addressing either Shakespeare’s text or the history of Coriolanus.

Of course the play rightly is a study of the nature of political power, and the place of severity and leniency, economic extravagance and hardship. Those questions are indeed with us today. I wonder whether they are best examined, however, by bringing them into the context of contemporary material and social culture, or by expanding our imaginations to encompass them in the more remote contexts. Part of the value, I would argue, of engaging with Shakespeare’s plays is the variation among their settings. My sense is that Fiennes and his production team don’t trust our imaginations to be able to connect the more remote matter to our own reality. Only by gross surgery can the play be made palatable and politically instructive.

In the process, the play is brutally cut, squandering our opportunity of hearing more of Shakespeare’s text within its two-hour compass in order to show us more military and social violence. There are also a number of instances in which speeches are taken from one person and given to another (not unheard-of, but problematic, to my mind), and bits are changed here and there. In I.iii, Valeria says: “your lord and Titus Lartius are set down before their city Corioli.” This is given to Menenius, and revised as “your lord and Titus Lartius are set down before the Volscian city of Corilius”. Not only is “Coriolus” never mentioned as a singular noun once in the whole play, but its vowels are never permuted into “Corilius”. Whether that was the script as revised or Brian Cox’s mismanagement of the word is unclear. In II.i, though, Coriolanus has the line “Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear”, and there the name of the town comes out as “Corioles”. Significant speeches are jettisoned, such as the famous speech of Menenius in the first scene about the rebellion of the body against the belly. What’s left is still at least moderately interesting, but the whole is thrown out of balance thereby.

The acting is on the whole very impressive. There’s a wide range of ethnic voices represented, with African and East European accents folded into the mixture: I certainly don’t have a problem with that, but I can’t help thinking that it’s supposed to be telling us something that is nevertheless not particularly clear. The lead parts are all taken by noted actors: Ralph Fiennes is in good form, as is Gerard Butler; Vanessa Redgrave is, as always, imposing, and she delivers her final speech, where she sues her son to return to Rome, with fervor and passion.

All in all, this is a curiously watchable film, but it feels as if it was being presented more for the sake of making some obscure political point than for telling its own story. As Shakespeare it’s very sketchy, and should be taken with a grain of salt, as (at best) an adaptation, rather than a version, of the play. To its credit, the closing credits claim that it was “based on” Coriolanus. That’s about right.

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