Someday somebody is going to get around to filming a Shakespeare play in actual period costume. This doesn't mean that Ralph Fiennes's version of Coriolanus would have been dramatically improved had he and Gerard Butler been facing off in full Roman legionnaire garb while everybody else pads around in togas and sandals, but it might have made the attempts to force modern relevance less strained. In any case, Fiennes has turned out a well-crafted and passionately acted drama about power and its dangers that should at the very least serve as a model for other directors on how to perform Shakespeare on screen. The fact that in this film they're often doing so on a cable news show or while brandishing a Kalashnikov is just so much window-dressing.
Since he's the director (a first-timer, here), Fiennes gets the title role of Caius Martius Coriolanus, one of Rome's most revered generals. It's a nice fit, as Martius's flared-nostril temper and bloody-mindedness plays right to that slithery dark core which Fiennes has been nurturing in films from In Bruges to the Harry Potter series. Fiennes plays Martius with telling complexity, as a truly heroic warrior who is nevertheless a pampered son of the aristocracy, an arrogant proto-fascist who is also possessed of greater honesty than the politicians and citizenry baying for his blood.
In one of the first scenes, the citizens of "a place calling itself Rome" -- an intentionally nonspecific modern urban setting of graffiti and concrete high-rises -- are marching on the granaries, demanding food. Martius faces them down, but instead of just unleashing his serried ranks of helmeted riot police, he storms out to lecture the protestors on their inconstancy: "get you home, you fragments." After that, he's off to handle a border dispute with the neighboring Volscians, which he handles with aplomb, though failing to defeat his longtime nemesis, Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), in one-on-one knife combat.
Martius's arrogance extracts a price when he comes home a victor and is called upon to serve as consul, but he refuses to bow to the ancient custom and show the crowd the scars he received in battle. The idea, played out in the senate chamber on live television (cable news networks provide a running feed of exposition throughout), is abhorrently commonplace to him. Martius refuses with the pride both of the noble-born but also the soldier who doesn't want to be paraded like a show-pony, saying he won't "hear my nothings monstered." In one of those quick turns of fate that pepper Shakespeare's political tragedies (of which Coriolanus was his last), Martius goes from being the hero of the realm to a villain and is banished. At which point, he sees no reason not to team up with old Aufidius and declare war on Rome.
By shooting in Serbia and Montenegro, Fiennes was clearly not just trying to find a relatively unused backdrop for his drama. The region's history and its endless, squabbling conflict and schism echo through the film. But Shakespeare's knotty play is one of his least-performed for a reason. Unlike the grand sweep of dramas like Richard III, Coriolanus doesn't seem to have much in the way of clear-cut villains. Martius is a hard-nosed and vain man with the smell of a dictator about him (at one point it is said of Martius that "there is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger"), but the baying contempt of the senators is meant to be just as odious. There is just as much here to say about the corruption of power as there is about the fickleness of the crowd.
John Logan's sharply edged screenplay and Fiennes's clean-cut direction cleaves away much of the secondary dross that afflicts filmed Shakespeare and leaves the lines of dramatic action clear. This leaves plenty of room for Fiennes's company of actors (Vanessa Redgrave, especially, whose performance as Martius's power-hungry mother is subtle and poisonous enough to make you wonder what a Medea she would have made) to tear into their lines with a gusto that stops well short of the overheated theatricality of a Derek Jacobi. If the film can't ultimately pull off the sharp dramatic shifts without some neck-snapping tension (it's nearly impossible to buy Martius's sudden abandoning of his family and nation because of one perceived slight), the blame lies with the Bard and not the company.
