Coriolanus Film Review

CORIOLANUS
BBC FILMS
CUSHMAN COLLECTED

Caius Martius, surnamed Coriolanus, would do terribly in a U.S. primary. In fact he’d do terribly in any democratic political process. He just doesn’t know how to make nice to people. Not only does he not know how to do it, he doesn’t want to do it. And he has no inhibitions about telling the people so. The Coriolanus who’s the title character of one of Shakespeare’s greatest and toughest plays can be accused of many things, but hypocrisy is not among them. 

Coriolanus has never been a very popular play but it’s nearly always been a topical one. The new and very good movie version, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, is in modern dress, long an accepted practice in the theatre but fairly new to Shakespeare on film, or indeed on TV. It used to be assumed that a literal-minded audience, already having to cope with unfamiliar language, would just be confused if it issued from the mouths of people like themselves. There’s something in that; theatrical talk about making the plays “accessible” by scenically updating them can be very glib. The 1950s film of Julius Caesar, the one with Marlon Brando as Antony, showed that in one respect the screen could have a (literally) huge advantage over the stage, simply by showing us a crowd in the Forum hundreds, maybe thousands strong. But they all wore togas; I doubt if that play has much to gain from modern dress, on stage or screen. Caesar is about political issues, sure, but Coriolanus deals with political process: a process whose practice and psychology unites three eras: Rome’s, Shakespeare’s and ours. Fiennes makes both the civic and the military battles stunningly immediate.

The play Coriolanus begins with a demo. So does the movie. The citizens of Rome have taken to the streets, proclaiming that they’re starving and that the ruling patricians are hoarding grain. (We never do find out if the latter charge is true.) The man they blame is the war hero Martius, whose contempt for anyone lower born than himself is notorious and unconcealed, indeed flaunted. The riot, if that’s the word, looks like something you might see any night on the news, and the film cuts away to show us a video feed of it being watched with interest by Rome’s current enemy, the Volscians. An update appears at the bottom of the screen: “General Martius imposes martial law.”

John Logan’s screenplay has cut many lines from the play, and cleverly re-assigned many more, but it hasn’t added any, at least not spoken ones. That caption, though, is the movie’s own invention as are others like it. It also departs from the source in the message it carries. The Martius of the play does not have the power to impose martial law, and may not even have the will. He makes threatening noises but he is at heart indifferent to political power; it’s impossible, despite the alarming militaristic trappings, to label him a Fascist. Later on his friends and family will have him run for office, because that’s what war heroes do, but for his more practical fellow nobles he’s a figurehead, somebody to be admired and to be embarrassed by. One of them is his friend and surrogate father Menenius, whom the crowd describes, credulously, as “one who has always loved the people” and who now appears, also by TV remote, pouring oil, which is what he does best. Come the end of the picture Menenius will be unduly sentimentalised, but as played by Brian Cox he’s a wonderfully recognisable figure, at home in any club or committee room, and on good if spiky verbal terms with his left-wing opponents (also very recognisable) whom he characteristically addresses over his shoulder while enjoying a drink..

There’s one small cut in the first scene that’s unfortunate: the line in which the leader of the protest admits Martius’ outstanding war service but says that he did it “to please his mother.” This is the mainspring of the hero’s heroism and of his downfall, and it should be broached at the start. It would also prepare the ground for our first sight of the matriarch herself, Volumnia. Vanessa Redgrave plays her at this point with imperious cheerfulness, exulting in the wounds her son has received in previous campaigns and those he’s about to get in his next one.

Which is where we immediately find him, besieging the Volscian city of Corioles. And it’s here that both the medium and the modernity do their most transformative work. Actors on a stage can talk about sacking a city but, whether they’re wearing tunics or fatigues, it can all seem very distant, very abstract. Here we get to experience what it actually entails. We see the Roman troops blasting their way through actual streets; we see civilians, men and women, cowering in corners and Martius himself shooting them at point-blank range. I doubt the Martius we meet in the play would have done that – he has his own peculiar chivalric code – but it’s an issue that Shakespeare, with his stylized stage battles, didn’t have to confront. A movie doesn’t have that option, certainly not now. Fiennes does manage to retain the Elizabethan theatre tradition of single combat between the generals and, against all realistic odds, gets away with it. Martius and his Volscian counterpart Aufidius (Gerard Butler) are so locked into their hatred and jealousy of one another that it’s just about believable. Fiennes shot much of his picture in Bosnia, and the associations certainly help, but I suspect that these scenes could have transfixed us in any location.

It has been possible in the past to make a Shakespeare movie that glorified war, or at least the war effort. Like Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh before him, Fiennes has made his film directing debut with a Shakespeare play in which he also acts, in a role that he’s already played on stage. For both Olivier and Branagh the film was Henry V, another war-piece that each interpreted according to the tenor of his times; for Olivier, in World War Two, it was a patriotic rallying-cry; for Branagh, post-Falklands, it was blood and guts and scepticism. Both went on to make films of Hamlet; and in a final turn of the screw, Branagh, having dogged the footsteps of Olivier’s career, has now actually played him in My Week with Marilyn: the least mannered of actors impersonating one of the most mannered, and not only bringing it off but getting an Oscar nomination for it. As it further happens both actors have been notable Coriolani on stage; Olivier’s, by all accounts, was one of his greatest performances. It seems he made the man likeable. Fiennes doesn’t, and probably couldn’t. He makes him instead perversely admirable, which is probably closer to the play’s truth.

The name Coriolanus is an honorific bestowed on Martius for having conquered Corioles. In one of Shakespeare’s (and Redgrave’s) nicest touches his mother, on his return to Rome, gives a half-proud half-shy smile at having to pronounce this new word. It also leads to his being invited by his fellow-patricians to run for the top job of Consul. The catch is that the election process means meeting the lower classes face to face, showing them his war-wounds, and asking for their literal and metaphorical “voices”. This he loathes doing; he has nothing but contempt for “the people” and has never disguised it. He’s also, despite his bravado, pathologically shy. Under pressure, he consents to go through the motions; but his distaste shows through, and he ends up being banished, by popular acclaim. Once again the movie takes an antique custom and makes it seem contemporary. It is after all only an extreme literal version of what politicians routinely do to solicit votes. Some of the arguments that in the text happen in the market-place are transferred to a TV studio. It’s too much of a clever thing when a real-life newscaster, playing himself, addresses his audience in blank verse, but otherwise these scenes too work with amazing naturalness, especially when a female citizen-pundit states the anti-Coriolanus case in the most earnestly reasonable of tones.

Making something contemporary isn’t the same as making it timeless. Coriolanus in the theatre is one of the very few plays that can capture the sensation of history on the move. The movie, with all its apparent technological advantages, doesn’t do that, partly because the text has been so streamlined. Coriolanus’ exile, with no judicial process, is credible in the play, where it’s the climax of a long inexorable process. In the movie, you wonder where the people-power has suddenly come from. Admittedly the protagonist makes it easier by taking matters into his own hands; telling the populace “I banish you” he turns his back on Rome and on Roman exceptionalism. “There is” he proclaims with terse and clinching eloquence “a world elsewhere.”

One of Fiennes’ finest moments in the film, this is also one of the few occasions on which he allows himself a long speech. Elsewhere he plays things very close to his chest. Perhaps he’s bowing to perceived necessity. Film and TV have always had a problem with Shakespeare’s language. One reason Cox’s performance works so well is that most of his role is in conversational prose; asked to speak rhetorical verse on screen, most actors’ instinct is to scale it down, aiming for a kind of naturalism that, given the size of the words, sounds very unnatural. The one performer here who rides right over that compromise is Redgrave. One reviewer has said that Redgrave, though a great actress, is not the greatest verse-speaker. Actually she’s a superb verse-speaker, able to preserve the shape and momentum of the lines while still making them sound real. Her role, the third-longest in the play, has been cut less than anyone else’s; which is sensible as the climax depends on letting her talk at length. Coriolanus, breaking what would once have been his ultimate taboo, has offered his services to the Volscians and they’re marching unstoppably on Rome, which knows it’s about to receive the same treatment that it inflicted on Corioles. Only his mother, who has guided his every step, can stop the human war-machine in his tracks. Why she should want to I’ve never quite understood (wouldn’t she be inclined to tell him to burn down the ungrateful city with her blessing?) but patriotism trumps maternity. She doesn’t do it alone; she has the support of the wife whom Martius calls his “gracious silence” whose influence is more believable in Jessica Chastain’s performance than in any other I have seen, and of their young son whose words and actions also makes more sense here than ever before. The turning-point of this very public drama is determined, ironically enough, by private affections. Volumnia’s victory is signalled by the most eloquent stage-direction in Shakespeare, followed by one of the most devastating lines. The direction is “he holds her by the hand, silent”; the line is “oh mother, mother what have you done?” The machine breaks. The greatest Coriolanus I’ve ever seen was Nicol Williamson, whose death was announced last week, and he uttered those words with a giant, wracking sob. He fell apart before our eyes and ears. Fiennes’ collapse isn’t on that massive scale but it’s wrenching enough.

Volumnia returns to Rome in triumph, though the film falls down in not showing us her awareness that in saving the city she has signed her son’s death-warrant. (Martha Henry, in two successive Stratford Festival productions, has brought this off superbly.) Coriolanus returns to the Volscians, to be murdered by his enemy-turned-ally Aufidius, who’s been awaiting just such an opportunity. He says he’s sorry afterwards, but the film predictably cuts this, just as much earlier it’s cut Martius’ surprisingly touching sympathy for a Volscian captive who’d once been kind to him and his characteristic and rather endearing failure to remember the man’s name.

Those are losses. Sympathy doesn’t equal sentimentality: certainly not in a play whose climax is a man’s surrender to human bonds he thought he had transcended. Sympathy is also, in Shakespeare, unpredictable and impartial. The citizens are fickle and easily manipulated; they’re also real men (and, in the film, women) with real grievances. Coriolanus’ views on the poor are to the right of Mitt Romney’s, but no-one could accuse him of playing politics; in fact his friends wish he could. The play has been claimed for both right and left, but it eludes both. All that, all the essentials, the film gets sternly and thrillingly right.