http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/coriolanus-berlin-review-99359

Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in 'Coriolanus' as William Shakespeare's Rambo in a production that delivers heavyweight screen acting at its best.


BERLIN – At a time when revolution is once again in the air around the world, Ralph Fiennes delivers a ferocious reminder of the perils in store when a warrior becomes the head of state.

He directs and stars in Coriolanus as William Shakespeare's Rambo, an invincible soldier who survives odds so overwhelming that he comes to believe that he alone merits the title Consul of Rome.

Set in current times with Shakespeare's language adapted skilfully by John Logan, and performed under Fiennes' direction with modern phrasing, the film illuminates the playwright's astonishing gift for timeless insight into what moves the human spirit and motivates ambition.

It could be sold as a straightforward action picture and should not put off those who find Shakespeare daunting. It's a tough, violent and moving tragedy with splendid performances by Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave as his mother, Brian Cox as his friend Menenius, and Gerard Butler as his enemy Aufidius. Its success should carry beyond festivals and scholars to a mainstream audience.

There are more battles in Coriolanus than any other Shakespeare play and while Fiennes deploys tanks, rockets and automatic weapons in the many scenes of urban combat, he gives pride of place to cold steel to echo the story's origins.

Filmed in Belgrade, Serbia, the setting is "A place calling itself Rome" that could be anywhere. Caius Martius (Fiennes) arrives back in the city-state bloodied but victorious after his most recent battles to be acclaimed as a peerless warrior. His mother Volumnia (Redgrave) exudes unquenchable pride in her son even as she observes, "Before him he carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears."

He has defeated Aufidius, leader of the rebel Volsces and won the city of Corioles, so he is dubbed Coriolanus. Urged on by his mentor Menenius and the ambitious Volumnia, Martius expects to be given the highest rank in the Senate despite opposition from Tribunes Brutus (Paul Jesson) and Sicinius (James Nesbitt).

Before he may claim that position, however, he must gain the support of the people and there's the rub because he has led brutal reprisals against social protestors and has no taste for the posturing required to appease the crowd.

With hunger and deprivation widespread, campaigners Cassius (Ashraf Barhom) and Tamora (Lubna Azabal) help the opposing Tribunes turn the crowd's reaction into a frenzied rejection of their proposed leader. Outraged and betrayed, Martius is banished. He leaves home and family with only vengeance in mind, and heads off to find Aufidius so they can assault Rome together.

The meeting between the two sworn enemies is fraught with danger since their most recent bloody encounter has left them both scarred and vengeful. But Martius' fearless approach and unmatched skills in battle win over the Volsces and they come to worship him almost more than they do Audifius.

With Rome now desperate, the story plays out as Martius plots his return, Audifius contemplates his own future, and the desperate Tribunes send first Menenius and then Volumnia to plead for peace.

It's a Shakespearean tragedy, however, and things do not go well. Along the way, Fiennes and Butler have the martial swagger to match their incisive vocal delivery while Cox and especially Redgrave have emotional lines that they render with grace and delicacy. Redgrave also can change temper and spit out vituperation to match the agile Fiennes. They make a vitriolic pair – heavyweight screen acting at its best.

With great help from a fine cast plus production designer Ricky Eyres and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, with whom he worked on The Hurt Locker, Fiennes produced a piece of Shakespeare with a cutting edge as sharp as it is bloody.

Venue: Berlin Film Festival, In Competition

Sales: Icon Entertainment International

Production: Artemis Films, Hermetof Pictures, BBC Films, Lonely Dragon
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Brian Cox, Vanessa Redgrave
Director, producer: Ralph Fiennes
Producers: John Logan, Gabrielle Tana, Julia Taylor-Stanley, Colin Vaines
Screenwriter: John Logan, based on the play Coriolanusby William Shakespeare
Director of photography: Barry Ackroyd
Music: Ilan Eshkeri
Costume designer: Bojana Nikitovie
Editor: Nic Gaster
No rating, 122 minutes

This is from the guy who tweeted about Coriolanus (I included his tweets in the tweet thread)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8324036/Coriolanus-Berlin-Film-Festival-review.html

Coriolanus, Berlin Film Festival, review
Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut is nothing to be sniffed at.
Rating: * * *

Gerard Butler in Coriolanus, directed by Ralph Fiennes By Tim Robey 5:32PM GMT 14 Feb 2011

Ralph Fiennes has said he wasn’t finished with Coriolanus, the role he played in a justly celebrated 2000 production at London’s Almeida. Marking his directorial debut, and premiering at the Berlin Film Festival, a modern-dress version of this great work about power, ego and political capital gets off to a shaky start, but builds and deepens: he ends up making good, urgent sense of the play on screen.

Set in “a place calling itself Rome” (it was shot in Belgrade), John Logan’s taut adaptation begins in a generically recognisable 21st-century war zone, helped hugely by the go-to cinematographer for jittery combat scenarios, Barry Ackroyd (The Hurt Locker). Fiennes’s Caius Martius, shaven-headed and brutally aloof, emerges for his first bitter confrontation with the citizens as they take to the streets begging for bread, but the drama stalls early.

The siege of Corioli, pitting the general’s army against the hated Volsci, is fine as a set piece, with grenade launchers and all the rest of it, but context is so skimpy it only makes a vague impact.

The piece hits its stride with Martius’s return to Rome, where he’s anointed as Coriolanus and asked to apply for popular favour as a consul candidate. Listening to Fiennes commune awkwardly with the disgruntled plebs, and mutter “hang them” in the back of a limousine, you get an unmistakable whiff of Gordon Brown.

Perhaps because of the unprecedented task of directing himself on screen, the impression Fiennes’s performance makes here is only fitfully strong and not always disciplined, though he does rise to an impressively bloody pitch of rage in the great “I banish you!” speech. It’s done in a TV studio, with shades of election debates. Gerard Butler is sturdy enough as Aufidius, and his movie-star stature lends useful frissons to their shock alliance.

http://www.obsessedwithfilm.com/reviews/review-ralph-fiennes-brilliant-directorial-debut-coriolanus.php

Review: Ralph Fiennes’ Brilliant Directorial Debut CORIOLANUS

Rating: 5 stars

Forgive my ignorance or lack of cultural sophistication but I actually hadn’t heard of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus prior to the announcement that a Ralph Fiennes directed adaptation would be screened in competition at Berlin this year. It turns out that this was a terrible omission on my part, as Coriolanus is an especially relevant play when it comes to its themes as well as its basic story: a fact made all the more apparent by Fiennes’ sure-footed directorial debut which transports the play to a contemporary setting whilst retaining the 17th century language.


Coriolanus is set during a time of famine and hardship for the people of the Roman Empire and, like many of the Bard’s works, follows a flawed, tyrannical and ultimately tragic figure in the form of the titular Roman general, played by Fiennes. After fighting a war with his people’s enemies, who are lead by Audidius (Gerard Butler), Coriolanus returns to Rome as a hero and is urged to enter politics by his strong-willed patrician mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) as well as his trusted mentor Menenius (Brian Cox). However, a life-long soldier, Coriolanus is not a good speaker and struggles to win the favour of his people. Unlike Colin Firth in The King’s Speech however, he refuses to change and become a better public speaker, insisting that he’d sooner be true to his own character and unpopular, as opposed to false and popular. The people rebel and he is soon exiled, only to march on Rome alongside his old enemy some time later in a bid for revenge.

Fiennes may have changed the setting of the play in his version of the story – much like Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version of Romeo & Juliet – but all the original themes are left intact. He also retains all the place names meaning the film is ostensibly still set in Rome, although this is not the Rome of our world or even recognisably part of Italy. In making the film this way Fiennes draws attention to just how timeless Shakespeare’s stories can be. For instance the forum where Coriolanus must go to appeal for political power is now a market full of citizens and when he loses his temper with them it is now being recorded by 24 hour news as well as on every camera phone. Later his exile happens during a televised political debate.



Making the story relatable and relevant isn’t something he does merely by enforcing this change of setting though. This is also made possible by the actor’s Paul Greengrass-style direction; handheld cameras stripping the film of the formalised, sanitised sheen prevalent in many of the more traditional adaptations. In fact the scenes of urban warfare in Corionlanus are bloody and visceral like those in a straight-up war movie. The other major contributing factor to the film’s success – and probably the most important – is that the dialogue is delivered incredibly naturalistically which makes it immediately more understandable. Treating Shakespeare as if it were normal speech makes it far more accessible than when actors take the more stagey thespian route.

Particularly good at this is Fiennes who gives a towering performance of malignant rage and of great complexity, reprising a role he performed on stage over ten years ago. Butler is less sensational, but then he is given less to do, whilst Cox and Redgrave shine in their supporting roles too, with the latter being tasked with delivering some the play’s most crucial speeches. UK audiences will also appreciate the sight of Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow delivering Shakespearian dialogue in the style of a TV news reader.



Coriolanus is a brilliant first film from Ralph Fiennes as a director. At the post-film press conference he suggested that he and screenwriter John Logan would ideally like to follow it up by making Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which he suggested was likewise ideally suited to translation to film. If he can pull off this trick again with another of the writer’s less commonly adapted plays then I’d certainly be excited to see it. Coriolanus is certainly much more entertaining and interesting than Julie Taymor’s flamboyant and whimsical adaptation of The Tempest and should find an audience provided people aren’t put off by the language. The poetry maybe unfamiliar to many but the ideas and themes won’t be.

Coriolanus is currently listed on IMDB for a November opening in the U.S.

http://incontention.com/2011/02/14/berlin-coriolanus-redgrave-and-an-early-oscar-bet/

BERLIN: ‘Coriolanus,’ Redgrave and an early Oscar bet

The cavernous Berlinale Palast theatre was packed to the gills for today’s noontime press screening of “Coriolanus” (***), and small wonder — in a Competition lineup heavy on oatmeal fare boasting comparatively unfamiliar names, Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut is one of the few entries that affords viewers a little star-gazing.

Fiennes, of course, takes the title role in his revisionist take on Shakespeare’s under-filmed tragedy, with Gerard Butler, Brian Cox and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Jessica Chastain adding further name appeal.

As the crowd staggered out of the auditorium two hours later, the name being murmured most approvingly was that of the film’s oldest and most distinguished star. And with good reason. As Volumnia, the proud, politically-minded mother of the titular Roman general, Vanessa Redgrave gives one of “those” performances, an Olympian masterclass in classical acting that conjures spontaneous emotional fire upon a bed of immaculate technique.

Just listening to the richly controlled tremors and modulations in her voice as she powers her way through a titanic final monologue — turning her son’s political persuasions through reams of exquisite language — is enough to raise hairs on the back of your hands; all too rare are the opportunities to watch our greatest actors wrestle such material on screen.

Indeed, in recent years, Redgrave has reserved her most committed thespian efforts for the stage: as valued a supporting presence as she has been in film projects ranging from “Atonement” to “Letters to Juliet,” it’s safe to say she hasn’t had a big-screen showcase this generous since “Howards End” nearly 20 years ago, and still, her work here outstrips that for difficulty and magnitude.

Berlin isn’t usually the festival for such pronouncements (nor are such predictions ever wise, least of all in the dark days of February) but I’m going to make one anyway: Vanessa Redgrave will receive a 2011 Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. If the performance itself weren’t enough to set a campaign in motion, the fact that “Coriolanus” has just been acquired by The Weinstein Company certainly is.

If everything in Fiennes’s film was quite as staggering as Redgrave, we’d be looking at a Shakespeare adaptation for the ages. In case that star rating at the top of this piece didn’t tip you off, it’s not. Vastly shorn of text, but tidily updated by screenwriter John Logan to a modern-day military setting that fuses Roman geography with British cultural reference points — in a delightful touch, BBC newsreader Jon Snow turns up as an iambic pentameter-spouting version of himself — “Coriolanus” runs hot, cold and very, very loud for much of its running time, until both Fiennes’s conceptual ideas and the actors’ energies peak in time for a knockout final act.

Fiennes’s aggressive militarization of the material extends to hiring the great DP Barry Ackroyd, fresh from lensing combat films for Kathryn Bigelow and Paul Greengrass, to lend the film a vérité texture that, ironically enough, comes over a little dated; on another note, it’s hard to gauge how aware Fiennes’s is of tonal resemblances between his treatment and Richard Loncraine’s Third Reich-flavored “Richard III.” If the film is perhaps less radical than its makers imagine, however, its considerable achievement is that the update works, making contemporary political sense even within its ambiguous milieu.

Surprisingly, Fiennes’s performance turns out to be a less reliable asset than his direction. With his capacity for calculating impenetrability, the actor was born to play this most unreachable of Shakespearean anti-heroes, but for every icily authoritative note he strikes, there’s one of thin, ill-judged shoutiness that overeggs the fury in the Bard’s words. Still, if Fiennes the director hasn’t yet found a way to manage and discipline Fiennes the actor, he draws impressive work from the likes of Butler and Cox — while Redgrave’s majestic, film-elevating turn says much for his ability to capture lightning in a bottle. Academy voters, I know you’re busy with other matters right now, but take note.

So far this is the only article that seems to really acknowledge Gerry. I don't know if it means "impressive" like "impressive by anyone's standards" or "impressive compared to his past fluff/somewhat bad celeb reputation etc", you know?

I don't think Gerry''s part has a huge amount of lines. So it may be a lot of action (which he does well) and some lines that the reviewer was impressed with based on the weighty material. I just can't tell from the review.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/coriolanus-berlin-film-festival-2214960.html


Coriolanus, Berlin Film Festival
(Rated 4/ 5 )
All's well with this action hero

Reviewed by Geoffrey MacNab


Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus is a bloody, testosterone-filled updating of Shakespeare's play, shot and performed with real vigour. This is the Bard done action-movie style.


Making his directorial debut, Fiennes (who also plays the lead) takes the bold decision to set the film in what appears to be the Balkans of the 1990s. The film begins with CNN-style footage of Fiennes in army fatigues engaged in street fighting in a bombed-out city. Soon, he comes face to face with his arch-enemy, the hirsute Aufidius (Gerard Butler), commander of the Volscian army. Utterly implausibly, the troops lay down their guns while the two commanders engage in single combat with knives.

Anachronisms abound. The scenes in which characters deliver long soliloquies in blank verse and then jump into tanks can be disconcerting. The riot scenes that invoke anti-globalisation protests and sequences of politicians running around in suits are likewise jarring as is the cameo from Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow. However, Fiennes directs with such verve that the occasional discordant moments are never a problem. He is helped by Barry Ackroyd's wildly energetic camerawork and some redoubtable character performances. Vanessa Redgrave excels as Volumnia, the tough-as-flint mother of Coriolanus who takes pride in her son's bloody exploits. Brian Cox brings wisdom and fatalism to his role as Menenius.

After the stormy introduction, Coriolanus is plunged into the backstabbing world of "Roman" politics. He is far too abrasive a figure to thrive and soon ends up in exile, joining his former enemies the Volscians as they march on Rome.

Fiennes knows Coriolanus inside out. He played the role in a well-received stage version directed by Jonathan Kent a decade ago. His screenwriter John Logan helps turn Shakespeare's original text into a script with a hint of The Hurt Locker about it. This, too, is a film about men addicted to war. Fiennes and the other cast members deliver their lines with such conviction that we never question why they are speaking in blank verse. They don't seem embarrassed and so neither should audiences.

In the course of the film, Fiennes undergoes a number of transformations. Early on, he's the archetypal military man, marching around with his sleeves rolled up as if he is the Roman army's answer to General Petraeus. Then, when he goes into exile, he grows his hair long and turns into a backpacker. Finally, once he has thrown in his lot with Rome's enemies, he has his head shaved and becomes ever more psychopathic. Both in his own performance and in his role as director, Fiennes is going for intensity at all costs. There is no humour here. Nor are there any lighter scenes. The mood is deliberately very dark throughout.

It's questionable whether Fiennes and his team uncover anything new by reworking Coriolanus and setting it in the present day. What they do deliver is a rousing and primal drama – one of the few films likely to appeal to action fans and Shakespeare lovers in equal measure.

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944611?refcatid=31

Coriolanus


A decade after tackling the character onstage, Ralph Fiennes reprises a juicy Shakespearean role in his bloody, bellicose directorial debut, "Coriolanus," ambitiously updating the late-career tragedy to "a place calling itself Rome" (actually present-day Belgrade, Serbia) in a move that places this among the Bard's more macho adaptations. Drastically cutting back Shakespeare's second-longest play from its original form without sacrificing the flavor of the original language, Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan emerge with a reasonably commercial war movie that is most effective in its least talky stretches, but somewhat difficult to follow in the finer points of its political intrigue.

Gen. Caius Martius, aka "Coriolanus," is rather unusual among soliloquy-prone protags in that he not only scorns the public but also withholds much of his reasoning, preferring to prove his worth on the battlefield. When he does speak, it is often with the scorching force of a flamethrower. Coriolanus is a dragon among men, scarred of skin, shaved of head and tattooed to boot -- the sort of fearsome character that gives Fiennes ample opportunity to bare his teeth and flex his throbbing neck veins.

Unlike Coriolanus, however, Fiennes the director obviously values common folk quite highly, trusting his audience to navigate the dense snarls of Shakespearean verse amid a gnarly thicket of difficult-to-decipher accents. Assisting somewhat are exposition-friendly TV news updates that lay out the key details: Coriolanus has tyrannically suspended civil liberties while Rome is under siege by the Voluscian army, headed by Gerard Butler's guerrilla-like Aufidius.

Film's first half is rather challenging to navigate, with vivid military showdowns bringing cinematic excitement to a complex series of political maneuvers that see Coriolanus decorated for his service, elected as consul on the strength of his achievements and ultimately banished from Rome by a pair of conniving officials (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson) who want the arrogant war hero out of the way. Coriolanus shows little interest in government and even less patience with the ungrateful rabble he fought to liberate, and when it comes time for the talkshow tribunal that will decide his fate, he loses his temper and scorns all those who condemn him.

The plot becomes considerably easier to follow once Coriolanus is cast out of the city, as he humbly allies himself with sworn enemy Aufidius, who finds it easy to forgive now that they are united in their hatred of Rome. Coriolanus' former countrymen stand no chance in the face of these two fearsome warlords, placing even the general's old allies in danger. His most loyal supporter and mentor, Senator Menenius (Brian Cox), serves as the voice of reason and rhetoric throughout, but even he is powerless to sway Coriolanus' bloodlust.

Rome's only hope, then, is Coriolanus' mother, Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), a curious character who encourages her son's vanity and barbarism with words that ring of the incestuous. "If my son were my husband," she advises daughter-in-law Virgilia (Jessica Chastain, elegant but underused as the Helen of Troy-like trophy dividing the men); later, beseeching Coriolanus' sympathy, she says, "There's no man in the world more bound to his mother."

And so it is that "Coriolanus," which swings between scenes of brutal 21st-century warfare (an early fight between the title character and Aufidius proves especially pulse-quickening) and highest-level political trickery, hinges on a simple tete-a-tete between the utterly ruthless Coriolanus and his iron-willed mother. Redgrave is more than game to step up when the moment calls for it, while Fiennes -- who's been a coiled nerve for most of the film -- earns the tragic sympathy his fate requires in his understated reaction to this key confrontation.

As directing debuts go, "Coriolanus" could easily pass for the work of an accomplished master, and though the storytelling lends itself to easy confusion (owing more to the source material than to the execution), the emotional impact reads loud and clear. By choosing such a compelling backdrop as Belgrade for his update and then surrounding himself with experts, Fiennes has made the job easy on himself. Chief among the pros, d.p. Barry Ackroyd ("The Hurt Locker") brings an intensity to the entire affair, framing everything in visually loaded widescreen, while bombastically inclined composer Ilan Eshkeri keeps the music to an appropriately subdued but nonetheless menacing level.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/feb/15/ralph-fiennes-coriolanus-film-review

Coriolanus – review
Andrew Pulver guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 February 2011 15.18


Ralph Fiennes played Coriolanus on stage more than a decade ago, and presumably it seemed like a safe choice with which to embark on a directorial career; like Kenneth Branagh before him with Henry V (and Laurence Olivier before him, with the same play), high-achieving theatre actors will be confident, and entirely credible, in their handling of the intricacies of the Shakespearean text. It's ironic, therefore, that the best film Shakespeares tend to be furthest removed from the British stage tradition: foreign-language versions such as Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran, and Kozintsev's King Lear, don't need to worry about getting the poetry right. The most interesting English-language ones, such as Derek Jarman's Tempest and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, affix their own preoccupations to the Shakespearean motifs, and essentially turn the play into something else entirely.

It's immediately evident that Fiennes isn't doing anything especially drastic, conceptually, to the play. His Coriolanus is one that pays due attention to the text and the lineaments of classic drama. Not that this is a static, interpretation-free response: Coriolanus, being a drama about the relationship of authority, power, and the emotions that drive them, is reconfigured as a study of a modern Balkan-type state, racked with factional warfare and all the attendant cruelties.

In truth, it's a very "theatre" way of going about things, and easily done on stage: film-makers have often struggled to establish the level of detail a cinematic rendering requires.

That's not the case here. Coriolanus, of course, is originally set in pre-imperial Rome: the drama turns on Coriolanus's refusal to court the favour of the Roman people after a string of military successes sees him propelled toward election as a consul – only for political machinations to see him expelled from the city, and to trigger a lust for revenge on Rome. This would seem a natural fit for Fiennes and writer John Logan's transposition of the action to a modern state racked by civil war and political infighting. Fiennes, and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (fresh from The Hurt Locker), pull off some frankly shattering combat scenes, as Fiennes's Coriolanus leads his men in a room-by-room firefight with Gerard Butler's Aufidius. Butler, a tough, beefy presence, is at his lowering best during a memorably nasty sequence in which a prisoner of war is consigned to a gruesome underground torture chamber.

But the great strength of Fiennes's film is simply its clarity and intelligence. He's clearly paid a great deal of detailed attention to how the narrative and the interplay of character is to work – vital in Shakespeare films that can easily get bogged down in versification. No doubt he's helped by the plainness of much of Coriolanus's language, which means there is less precious material that can't be cut. Some of the storytelling devices are a little flip – there are regular Sky News-style video inserts that don't do the film's seriousness any favours – but they don't disrupt the careful geometry of action that Fiennes sets out.

It also means that, as a performance, his Coriolanus doesn't hog attention, even though he's the focus of the action. He has, understandably, given himself some eye-catching scenes: head drenched in blood during his fights, and pacing the halls of government buildings in an agony of resentment at the demands of the population. But Fiennes has exercised commendable restraint, allowing others to shine too. He can congratulate himself that his first film as a director is a fine achievement.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-16/rifle-toting-fiennes-mows-down-rebels-in-bloody-coriolanus-berlin-film.html

Rifle-Toting Fiennes Mows Down Rebels in Bloody `Coriolanus': Berlin Film

A scarred, shaven, tattooed Ralph Fiennes in combat gear and wielding an assault rifle shoots up independence fighters in a burned-out city. This is Shakespeare, Fiennes-style.

His first full-length feature as director, “Coriolanus,” is showing in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s a blood-soaked, action-packed update of one of Shakespeare’s trickier plays to stage. Fiennes and scriptwriter John Logan kept the original text though they cut large chunks and added scenes.

Shot in Belgrade, “Coriolanus” is a violent political thriller with iambic pentameter dialogue, homoerotic undertones and some fine acting from Royal Shakespeare Company veterans including Vanessa Redgrave as Fiennes’s dominant, ambitious mother, the majestically named Volumnia. As with most Shakespeare plays, the story is universal: War-mongering political leaders who care little for ordinary folk are sadly just as present on the world stage today as they were in the 17th century.

Rioting Romans, demanding bread, storm the central grain store at the opening of the movie: Caius Martius (later Coriolanus) confronts them with his brutal, ferociously equipped troops. Meanwhile, the neighboring Volscians, led by Gerard Butler as Tullus Aufidius, are threatening Roman territory. Martius’s victory, secured in an improbable one-on-one knife fight with Aufidius, brings him glory and honor.

Bid for Consul
His iron-nerved, militaristic mother (she would have made a decent general herself as played by Redgrave) sees this as an opportunity to launch his political career. Yet Coriolanus messes up by showing contempt for the people of Rome when he is supposed to be canvassing for their votes. Pressing the flesh is just not his thing -- he prefers ripping it apart.

Othello had jealousy, Macbeth got ambition: Coriolanus’s fatal flaw is tactlessness. Banished from Rome, Fiennes spends time in the wilderness, emerging with lots of hair to seek out Aufidius and exact his revenge.

The relationship between these two warriors is fascinating: They swear to hate each other, and yet as he accepts Coriolanus’s offer to lead an attack on Rome, Aufidius also declares his passion.

It’s all in Shakespeare’s original, so this is not about sexing it up for a modern audiences: “But that I see thee here,/ Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart/ Than when I first my wedded mistress saw/ Bestride my threshold.”

Grisly End
Volumnia’s impassioned plea to Coriolanus changes his mind about attacking Rome and leads him to sign a peace agreement with the Volscians. Yet things get grisly again before the end.

Newscasters on a 24-hour channel called Fidelis narrate off-stage events -- in blank verse -- accompanied by video footage. Believe it or not, that almost works.

The conviction of all of the actors in delivering their lines injects freshness and immediacy into Shakespeare’s text. It rarely seems incongruous, and sometimes the language is so economical it takes your breath away.

Fiennes, 48, has played Coriolanus many times on stage and told a Berlin press conference he had the project in mind for many years, seeing it as natural fodder for an action movie. Funding for the film, which according to Premier Public Relations Ltd. will be released by year end, proved difficult.

It’s bold of Fiennes to try to make a film that will appeal to Shakespeare fans and action-movie addicts alike. He just might pull it off.

Rating: ***
What the Stars Mean:
**** Excellent
*** Good
** Average
* Poor
(No stars) Worthless

http://www.movieline.com/2011/02/berlinale-dispatch-ralph-fiennes-has-a-bard-time-with-coriolanus.php

Berlinale Dispatch: Ralph Fiennes Has a Bard Time With Coriolanus


I’m a sucker for modern-day reinterpretations of Shakespeare, a la Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, not because Shakespeare necessarily needs to be modernized, but because I’m always amazed at how much retooling, rejiggering and restuffing he can withstand: His work is like a magic carpet bag that never gets filled to capacity or worn out.

So I was curious about Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut, Coriolanus, in which Fiennes himself stars as Caius Martius Coriolanus, the uppity Roman general who finds himself in a pickle when the hungry people of Rome, suffering from a food shortage, decree that their plight is his fault. Proud of his military service and disdainful of those who haven’t similarly fought for their country, he denounces the poor, hungry masses, accusing them of, among other things, having bad breath. That plunges Coriolanus into a public-relations nightmare from which he can’t recover, the beginning of the end.

No one I’ve talked to today at the festival, not even among the better-educated British critics I know, has actually read Coriolanus. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have read it. But now that I’ve seen Fiennes’ version, I have some idea why the material doesn’t always find its way into the basic curriculum: It’s kind of a dud. No wonder it was the butt of an old Saturday Night Live joke, in which Robin Williams plays a Shakespearean stand-up who, after Coriolanus flops at the Globe, is cast in the lead of the theater’s next production, Hamlet, prompting the line, “Is that a dagger I see, or are you just glad to see me?”

Then again, Fiennes isn’t exactly laughing boy, so Coriolanus isn’t such an odd choice for his debut film — and he doesn’t do half badly with it, either. (The Weinstein Company has picked it up for distribution in the United States.) Fiennes played the title role in the play 11 years ago on the London stage, and apparently, he’s been turning it over in his mind ever since. The resulting picture drags in places, but Fiennes works hard to keep the rhythm going: He stages hand-to-hand combat sequences and knife fights as if he were making a smart action movie, not adapting Shakespeare, which is precisely the point. He recently told The Guardian, “If Shakespeare was alive today, I think he would write very easily for the cinema,” and he’s probably right. Nothing perks an audience up like a good rumble, and Shakespeare knew just how and when to drop ‘em in.

The cutting in Fiennes’ action sequences is clean and clear, not choppy. And Coriolanus’ tussles with his sometime-rival, sometime-cohort Tullus Aufidius (played by an amazingly not-horrible, if not exactly good, Gerard Butler) are worked out with the right mix of outright male aggression and twisted mutual admiration. It’s only when the two find themselves in the clinch, their musclebound arms wrapped firmly around each other’s necks, that they realize they’re just two sides of the same coin.

This Coriolanus is set in, as a title card wittily tells us, “A place calling itself Rome,” and if it isn’t exactly the real Rome — Fiennes shot the picture in Belgrade — it still has the feel of a modern, besieged big city. (The screenplay was adapted by John Logan.) The angry mob Coriolanus faces is a grass-roots terrorist group; in their rage and hunger they storm Rome’s “Central Grain Depot,” a bit of made-up silliness that’s perfectly believable in the movie’s context. (At times, Coriolanus somewhat resembles Alfonso Cuaron’s dystopian fantasy Children of Men.)

And if there are slack patches in the narrative, Fiennes and his fellow actors get us through them efficiently enough. Fiennes’ Coriolanus is a noble hard-ass with a scarred face and a shaved pate. He’s charismatic in a chilly way, and sympathetic only in the sense that, given his taciturn, rigid character, we can usually tell where he’s coming from. He’s hard to care for, but not easy to turn away from.

But the sleekest weapon in Fiennes’ arsenal is Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Coriolanus’ tough-love mom, Volumnia. If Coriolanus is cool as steel, we can see where he gets it: Volumnia is his female counterpart, his true partner in his life’s work, as the story’s incestuous undertones suggest. (The young actress Jessica Chastain plays Coriolanus’ retreating, suffering wife, Virgilia.) Redgrave’s Volumnia has the carriage of a warrior queen, her voice the smoothness and the bite of honey still in the comb — she makes even the play’s densest language seem as if it were written yesterday, not 400 years ago. In choosing Redgrave, Fiennes went out and hired the best. She’s modernity and timelessness in one magnificent package.

http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/89578/coriolanus.html


Coriolanus (2010)
Director: Ralph Fiennes


Time Out rating: 3 stars


Reviewed at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival


Must a politician be a good leader of people? Can a demagogue be a good politician? And does pride always come before a fall? Such are the ideas punched about in Shakespeare's brutal ‘Coriolanus’, the story of a successful, honoured Roman war leader who refuses to bow to pressure to satisfy the desires of the masses for a friendly face at the top of politics and, as a result, enters tragic freefall. Ralph Fiennes brings the play to the screen as actor, director and producer, and his version, which had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival this week, is resolutely vicious and bloody with some smart ideas about how to bring the late-Roman story into the modern world.

Fiennes played the role on the London stage in the battered, pre-development shell of the Gainsborough Studios in Islington in 2000, and here, as well as directing and producing, he reprises the role and adopts a similar decaying and war-torn fabric for his film. Place and time are indistinct, but it's a warring state in modern Europe and the locations in and around Belgrade in Serbia give it an eastern European, Balkan feel. The horror of the regions troubles in the 1990s are invoked, if not precisely quoted. As well as a strong sense of milieu, the other defining visual tics of Fiennes’s film are the omnipresence of television news and a frenetic, documentary-style shooting style (his director of photography is Barry Ackroyd, who shot ‘The Hurt Locker’ and often works with Ken Loach.) Television reports update us of the plot and the ticker-tapes on the bottom of the screen help us follow it. There’s even a studio discussion with Jon Snow – talking in iambic verse, of course.

It's a sensible, considered take on the play. Early fears that Fiennes is going to allow pyrotechnics to drown out the text – the opening is a full-on battle scenario (good for keeping the inevitable generation of A-Level student viewers awake) – soon disappear, and the performances and play are honoured in a way you would expect from a theatre veteran such as Fiennes. His cast is mixed. Brian Cox as Coriolanus’s friend and mentor, Menenius, is a warm and wise presence and Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’s mother has some very strong later scenes. Gerard Butler as Coriolanus’s nemesis Aufidius doesn't get far beyond brooding and growling.

Fiennes's Coriolanus is an intriguing and inscrutable man of power. We never really know exactly why he refuses to utter the odd, crowd-friendly line that would endear him to the populace and his downfall isn’t presented as entirely self-propelled. Shakespeare – and Fiennes's film – points the finger as much at the mob as at Coriolanus himself, and this element is well-served by the immediacy and back-biting of the television news reports that pop up throughout the film and are not as awkward as they so often are in cinema. Fiennes's new film isn’t a radical version of the play, but it’s respectful and clever, and his balance between the theatrical and the cinematic is impressive

http://technorati.com/entertainment/film/article/gerard-butler-ralph-fiennes-in-coriolanus/page-2/


Gerard Butler, Ralph Fiennes in Coriolanus

Author: Cirina Catania
Published: February 17, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Share12 Berlin, Germany, February 17, 2011 - (Reviewed at the Berlin International Film Festival - in competition.)


Ralph Fiennes is no stranger to the title role of “Coriolanus,” having played it in 2000 on the London stage at the Almeida Theatre, Gainsborough Studios. Fiennes says he’s been determined to reprise the demanding role on the big screen ever since.

This is, however, his first foray into directing and one wonders why he chose such a risky subject.



Will mainstream audiences respond to classic Shakespearean dialogue? Perhaps. Will they understand Fiennes’ vision? Perhaps. Especially when played so adroitly by Fiennes in the role of Roman General, Caius Martius Coriolanus and Gerard Butler his fiercest enemy, in a lion-like portrayal of Tullus Aufidius; both with an intense male sexual energy that is rare on screen.

Vanessa Redgrave is mesmerizing as Volumnia, his passionate and ambitious mother, whose every breath is dedicated to her son’s success as leader of the military and eventually as the leader of her beloved country.


The movie opens as the teeming masses, hungry for food and without the means necessary for comfortable lives, storm on the central grand depot of their city of Rome demanding bread. A violent reception awaits them and Coriolanus emerges from the fires of war into the mob followed by his soldiers. They are subdued and he is in ensuing days put forth as leader of this troubled land.

Coriolanus, although a great and fearless warrior is flawed and his weakness, seen in his personal and political struggles eventually causes his downfall and banishment from Rome. Far from over, however, his fall from grace compels us into the film’s more personal and compelling story as the two men, Coriolanus and Aufidius face the ultimate confrontation.



Like two wild animals, they circle and fight with the abandonment of those who have no fear of death. Coriolanus says of Aufidius, “He is a lion I am proud to hunt.” The intense hatred between the two is blurred by future events and in the field of battle. A mutual admiration develops that borders on primal, animalistic love.

The first act of the film may be too overtly bloody and violent for some, but if they persevere, a powerful story ensues.

The film is beautifully crafted, with a credible script adapted from Shakespeare’s original work, striking cinematography from Barry Ackroyd BSC (Hurt Locker) and superb editing by Nic Gaster.

Fiennes works his well-honed craft with the actors, who obviously trust him implicitly. Their work is large, raw and personal.

We will be hearing more about this film during Oscar season.