Coriolanus - review

Ralph Fiennes's first film as a director, shot in Belgrade and in the Serbian countryside, doesn't press the point too hard. But his Rome is a dirty, graffiti-strewn, contemporary city shot by Barry Ackroyd with the same sense of almost documentary detail that this cinematographer laid out before us in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. 

Striding grimly, here is the stern, unsmiling Caius Martius (Coriolanus), impersonated by Fiennes with grim disdain for the people and a fighting man's determination, after leading a campaign against incipient invaders, to occupy the position of consul. He is a complex, obstinate man who is clearly heroic in battle but hardly a hero in other respects, however proud his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) is of him.

His battle-dressed warrior, eventually chucked out of Rome because he won't compromise with his principles as a politician and can't disguise his distaste for the mob, is a formidable portrait but not one to endear him to the watcher. You may admire but you cannot love him, though his almost silent wife (Jessica Chastain) appears to.

His return to Rome as a conqueror in league with Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), his former enemy, is the moment when the play stands or falls as Volumnia pleads with him not to sack the city where he was once a garlanded hero.

Redgrave matches the power of Fiennes's performance and the scene when she pleads with her son not to destroy Rome is one of the most formidable in a bravely uncompromising film.

The slightly filleted and adapted text (by John Logan) is properly spoken by a cast that includes Brian Cox as Menenius, Coriolanus's worried friend.

This is Shakespeare played with total commitment, and whatever the shortcomings of the play itself, no one could accuse this adaptation of lacking relevance. It does, in fact, become more like a prescient lesson to us all.

Coriolanus
Cert: 15