Reviews for Coriolanus

Thanks for your review, Alice. I'm looking forward to seeing it!

London Film Festival review:

http://www.i-flicks.net/reviews/54-lff-2011/2835-lff-review-coriolanus

LFF Review: Coriolanus
Written by Ivan Radford
Sunday, 16 October 2011 12:17
Director: Ralph Fiennes
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Brian Cox, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, James Nesbitt

Lawrence Olivier. Kenneth Branagh. Now Ralph Fiennes joins the list of actors who have directed themselves in a Shakespeare film. And Fiennes is in good company, because his Coriolanus is cracking stuff.



“A place calling itself Rome” is how Fiennes introduces his modern setting, shoving Shakespeare’s play in the middle of a war-torn republic. Saving Private Ryan sequences litter the movie, but find an identity of their own in the opening assault on Corioles, as guns give way to a one-on-one knife fight between General Caius Martius (Fiennes) and his sworn enemy, Aufidius (Butler).



Soon enough, Caius has earned his title Coriolanus in battle, only to be betrayed by the politicians back home and banished from the city. And so Coriolanus does the only sensible thing: joins forces with Aufidius to wreak bloody revenge.



This is a loud take on the text, a chance for Fiennes to let rip with shouting and crazed sololiquys. (Indeed, there’s not a lot of the film when Fiennes isn’t smeared in blood.) At one point, he grabs Aufidius and jumps through a glass window. Just because. And it totally works, bringing a visual intensity to the cast’s blistering performances.



In Rome, Brian Cox brings gravitas to his parental figure Menenius, controlling the populace while James Nesbitt stirs up ill sentiment, all cheeky chappy smiles and sing-song delivery. In the opposite camp lies Vanessa Redgrave, a formidable mother to Fiennes’ warrior, who examines his wounds with a disturbing, wide-eyed glee.



At the helm, Fiennes commands solid readings of the play from the entire ensemble. Even Gerard Butler manages a strong, manly turn that tops everything else he’s ever done. But this is Fiennes’ show, and he isn’t afraid to let himself off the leash. Familiar with the part from his stage role 11 years ago, Fiennes keeps his Voldemort noises to a minimum as he runs around like a crazed butcher and whispers insults like “Go, you fragments” with quiet venom.



Credit should go to John Logan, too, whose smart script abridges and updates Shakespeare’s long, slow structure without losing sense of the text. Coriolanus’ betrayal now occurs on a daytime TV show, while the exposition-heavy messenger roles are expertly assigned to newsreaders – including, best of all, Channel 4’s Jon Snow, who delivers asides like “I never saw the like” with deadpan perfection.



Unfortunately, the visuals can get a little chaotic – at times, Fiennes seems content to just hold the camera in his hand and point it at his face as he sprints along. But he also encourages eye contact with the audience, adding emotional weight to the quieter scenes. With its fuzzy news footage and loud drums on the soundtrack, this Coriolanus is a hectic production, but it’s anchored by an actor at the height of his game. And like Olivier and Branagh before him, Fiennes makes Shakespeare as gripping as it ever was. Verily, Voldemort did good.

4 Stars

Movie Review: Coriolanus Fiennes tackles Shakespeare in directorial debut

By Joe Bendel

It has long been considered one of Shakespeare’s most divisive tragedies. Though academic appraisals remain quite mixed, Coriolanus always had its champions, including poet T.S. Eliot.

As a result, there are few cinematic predecessors against which actor Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut might be compared. In the Olivier-Branagh tradition, Fiennes also stars in his contemporary retelling of Coriolanus, which begins a one-week Oscar-qualifying engagement.

In a Balkan city that “calls itself Rome,” Caius Martius has earned the honorific title “Coriolanus” for his victory over the city-state’s bitter rival, the Volsces. At the behest of his proud mother Volumnia and her ally Senator Menenius, the general consents to campaign for the office of Consul.

The approval of the Senate is assured, but Coriolanus’s candidacy must also be accepted by the masses. This is a taller order, especially given the officer’s refusal to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Nonetheless, with Menenius’s help, Coriolanus appears to win over the people. Yet, just as quickly, the deceitful senators Brutus and Sicinius turn the crowd against him, with the help of a cadre of professional activists.

Venting his outrage, Coriolanus’s contempt for the fickle masses leads to his banishment. It also drives him to Volsces, where he makes common cause with his old nemesis, Tullus Aufidius. Dead to everything except his rage, Coriolanus will have his revenge in a manner befitting Shakespearean tragedy.

Given his abruptly shifting loyalties and his un-Shakespearean lack of introspection, Coriolanus is a difficult figure for many to get their heads around. However, Fiennes’s portrayal really unlocks his character.

We can understand how his rigid conception of honor compels each action he takes. Despite Coriolanus’s reticence, it is a big, seething performance of great physicality that commands viewer attention. Clearly, this is a man of action, not given to soliloquizing.

This is definitely Shakespeare at his manliest. (No tights or sonnets here, thank you very much.) Indeed, Gerard Butler matches Fiennes’s testosterone as Aufidius, while Vanessa Redgrave nearly outdoes them both as Volumnia, the motherly Lady Macbeth.

Yet, the real soul of the film comes from the great Brian Cox as Menenius, whose humanity leads inexorably to pathos. Though a relatively small part, it is also interesting to see South African actor John Kani, who projects a suitably stately presence as Coriolanus’s former superior officer, General Cominius.

Throughout Fiennes’s effectively streamlined film adaptation it is also obvious why the original play troubles so many critics, given its scathing depiction of the Roman masses as no more than a weapon to be wielded by the unscrupulous.

An impressive directorial debut, Fiennes stages some vivid scenes of war fighting. His resetting of the story works more often than not, though the cable news flashes in Shakespearean English can be a bit jarring. Strikingly cinematic, the Belgrade locales also add the weight of contemporary historical tragedy, heightening the on-screen drama.

One of the better recent Shakespearean films (considerably more satisfying than Taymor’s Tempest, for example), the unexpectedly timely Coriolanus is definitely worth seeing. It begins a special one-week run in New York at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square on Dec. 2 and then opens more widely on Jan. 20.

Coriolanus
Director: Ralph Fiennes
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain, Vanessa Redgrave, James Nesbitt, John Kani
Rating: R

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/arts-entertainment/movie-review-coriolanus-152528.html

'Coriolanus' review: Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler give Shakespeare adaptation a bloody, breaking-news appeal

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Thursday, December 1 2011, 12:00 PM

With Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave. A general overreaches his authority during a modern-day war.
Director: Ralph Fiennes. (2:02)
R: Violence.

A general advances his military into the war-torn city of Corioles — part Baghdad, part Beirut, part pre-fall Saigon — in battle scenes as urgent and thrilling as those in “The Hurt Locker” or “Saving Private Ryan.” Explosions and gunfire rain down on combat helmets. When the general’s enemy is found, the conflict devolves to a glass-smashing, primeval struggle between two leaders.

This is Shakespeare, circa 2011, and it is one of the striking first moments in “Coriolanus,” the directorial debut of actor Ralph Fiennes, who likely plotted out every detail of this muscular picture while sitting in the “Harry Potter” makeup chair waiting for his noseless scenes as Lord Voldemort.

But here, in his best performance since “Spider,” Fiennes plays the snarling, entitled general Caius Martius Coriolanus, whose bloody brow and bald head are stained with what’s left of his soldiers.

His foe is Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), who lives for the custom of conflict. But their years-long struggle has left their cities destitute and demoralized. The people of Rome march to demand more food, a lifting of sanctions and respect for their civil liberties. Meanwhile, Coriolanus’ wife (a fine Jessica Chastain), child and career-soldier mother, Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), prosper.

A public revolt stops Coriolanus at his peak. It strikes his pride, ends his grasp for even more power and banishes him to exile. Despite the behind-the-scenes dealings of Menenius (Brian Cox), a patrician political aide with the oily style of a Washington spinmeister, Coriolanus becomes a man without a land.

Which is when Aufidius, in the rival city of Antiem, finds his former enemy and offers a chance for revenge against Rome — and against the citizens Coriolanus once claimed to fight for.

The melding within “Coriolanus” of a ravenous media circus with Shakespeare’s lessons in political morality is delicious. Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan (“Gladiator,” “Hugo”) have a handle on how ego wags the tails of the modern dogs of war.

And, lurking in the background, Redgrave and Cox lend finesse to the pampered beasts they play. The only weak link is Butler (“300”), an appropriately brutish presence inevitably overshadowed by his role and his co-stars. Still, he strides through and never distracts.

The fine crowd “Coriolanus” really stands with from the past two decades includes Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine’s ’30s-fascist “Richard III” and Ethan Hawke and Michael Almereyda’s millennial “Hamlet.”

Fiennes brings an of-the-moment energy to one of Shakespeare’s later tragedies. Yet with its forever-war landscape, it couldn’t be more relevant.

Magic Moment: General Martius Coriolanus reveals his vicious true feelings to an angry populace that has turned on him.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/ralph-fiennes-gerard-butler-give-shakespeare-coriolanus-a-bloody-breaking-news-appeal-article-1.985240#ixzz1fh4an8et

In Coriolanus, Ralph Fiennes takes the words of William Shakespeare and puts them in a resonant contemporary setting. You half expect him to haul out cans of pepper spray when protesters gather to demonstrate at a grain mill in the wake of a food crisis.

Repurposing Shakespeare is nothing new for filmmakers, but here Fiennes takes one of the playwright's lesser-known works, originally set in the 5th century B.C., updates it to current times and imbues it with a gritty blood-spattered fierceness.

The setting, described in the film as "a place calling itself Rome," is a generic metropolis, nothing like the actual Italian city — currently or historically.

In addition to directing, Fiennes stars as Coriolanus, aka Caius Martius, a general who is more killing machine than wise commander. Feared by the local citizenry, he sneeringly refers to those who oppose him as "fragments."

But Fiennes' shaky handheld camera is sometimes off-putting and at odds with the Bard's iambic pentameter. Where a jarring shooting style worked so well to keep audiences off-kilter in a war movie like The Hurt Locker, here it comes across as more invasive and obtrusive.

Vanessa Redgrave nimbly plays Coriolanus' mother, Volumnia, a blend of formidable stage mother and a puppeteering power behind the throne. She prods her son to attain the public office of consul, but Coriolanus — anything but a political animal— resists. He refuses to kowtow to the masses he denigrates, and whose votes he needs to win the office. After all his years in battle, he's brutish and unfit for any life except waging war.

As public support eludes him, Coriolanus' wrath crescendos and leads to a melee which results in his banishment. Once exiled, he forges an alliance with his sworn enemy, Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and the pair wreak blood-spewing revenge on Rome.

Butler is in 300 mode, playing yet another variation of a gun-toting renegade, as he did in Law Abiding Citizen and Machine Gun Preacher.

As the arrogant antihero, Fiennes oozes wrathful menace and scorn, persuasively uttering such lines as "Anger's my meat." He tells his soldiers, "Make you a sword of me," but his battles resemble video games more than swordplay.

Redgrave is the film's unqualified highlight. The ever-graceful 74-year-old tosses off Shakespeare's language as if such poetry were second nature. She makes us believe her character more than any of the others, communicating a lively strength as well as resolute iciness with remarkable grace.

Jessica Chastain ably plays Virgilia, Coriolanus' hapless wife. She is proving to be a versatile young actresses , moving smoothly from a role as a flashy outsider among Southern belles in The Help to a fierce action heroine in The Debt and a grieving mother in The Tree of Life.

Less believable are the various newscasters and pundits who awkwardly wax poetic.

Never stinting on bloodshed, and occasionally sinking into convolution, the ambitious Coriolanus is most noteworthy for its zealous lead performances and Fiennes' directorial debut.

About the movie: Coriolanus - ** 1/2 out of four

Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler, Jessica Chastain, Brian Cox
Director: Ralph Fiennes
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
Rating: R for some bloody violence
Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Opens Friday in Los Angeles; expands to more cities in January


http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/story/2011-12-01/coriolanus/51548552/1

Film School Rejects Review

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/reviews/review-coriolanus-rruin.php


Review: ‘Coriolanus’ Is An Accomplishment Worthy of Its Shakespearean Bloodline

Let me start by confessing that I was a Theater and English major and have spent much of my academic career studying the works of the bard. William Shakespeare‘s plays were written as entertainment for the everyman and perhaps it does say quite a bit for the dumbing down of human civilization that work once enjoyed by the average Elizabethan “Joe” is now considered incomprehensible – but that doesn’t mean they are incomprehensible. Shakespeare’s been ruined for too many people who sat through interminable high school classes listening to their peers try to read it out loud.

Director and star Ralph Fiennes has made his Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, very accessible and very relevant. Maybe because I live in the land of Occupy Wall street, but scenes of heavily armed police ready to bash citizen protesters are chilling for me. There’s nothing really foreign about the language of the film (lifted straight from the stage play); it is still English for goodness sakes. Sometimes, it is a good thing for people to stretch their brains and challenge their minds. Yet, even so, the poetry of the film is used in a very natural way, making it very accessible to an audience not familiar with it. The story is hardly tough to follow, and the updating of the setting is not only effective, but really makes knowledge of Roman history unnecessary. The rise and fall of a stubborn, powerful man who seeks revenge against those who betrayed him hardly requires a history lesson to be understood.
Venal politicians are a staple of our modern lives. The senators who aid in the downfall of Coriolanus could walk right out of the U.S. Senate today, which just last week passed a defense bill allowing the military to use indefinite detention of all terror suspects, including U.S. citizens. It seems to me that Americans can recognize self-serving politicians pretty easily. And Coriolanus (Fiennes), the military man who can’t relate to the people, the man bred to fight who can’t cope with peace, surely is a character that U.S. audiences who have been living with a decade of war should be able to grasp.

This film is a must-see because it not only reshapes and revives one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, but because it shows how timeless his work is. It boasts stellar performances by Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler, and Brian Cox, and the entire cast do a fine job under Fiennes’ direction. Coriolanus marks his first time behind the camera, and Fiennes succeeds in creating a truly memorable film. Filming in Serbia, the scene of so much bloody conflict, is an inspired setting for a tough, bloody story. The stark and battered landscape and the utilitarian buildings all evoke a militarized nation where the people are restless and looking for someone to take their anger out on.

Fiennes also rounded out his crew with some notable and talented members to up the accomplishment of the film. If upon seeing Coriolanus, you think of The Hurt Locker, it’s because cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (who brought so much gritty immediacy to that film) worked with Fiennes on Coriolanus. There’s the hand-held camera, adding to the in-the-moment feel that serves the updated setting well. John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator) adapted Shakespeare’s play, paring it down to a very effective and lean two hours.

Fiennes is a great actor and his directorial debut makes me want to see what he does next as a director. What might be a surprise to audiences who know Butler from action films and rom-coms is his ability to go toe-to-toe with Fiennes. Their scenes together are electric, filled with energy. Fiennes makes a spectacular directorial debut worthy of his own prodigious talent as an actor, and it’s clear he wasn’t going to mess around and give one of the most important roles in his film to an actor he didn’t think could match him. Butler is talented, but he needs the right director to really bring it out. The role of Aufidius is perfect for him, and he inhabits it. The relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius is complex, to say the least, a love/hate affair between two sworn enemies. Butler is tasked with conveying the respect that comes more from the side of Aufidius (who sees Coriolanus as a potential comrade in arms, if only they weren’t on different sides), and Butler more than pulls it off.


But what’s most impressive about the film is that it isn’t a vanity production. Fiennes’ respect for his cast is so evident in the way he really lets them fly. Vanessa Redgrave already picked up a best actor at the British Indie film awards. No surprise, as she’s downright fierce as Volumina, the mother of the fallen Coriolanus. If I had my way, Coriolanus would pick up a truckload of similar awards.

I well understand we live in the age of the short attention span, but this is a piece of work that might just open eyes and expand minds. It might even introduce audience to some of the most extraordinary works of art created in the history of humankind. Shakespeare, not just for scholars, but as intended, for the masses.

The Upside: Frankly, everything. I’ve seen plenty of film adaptations of Shakespeare and this is one of the best. A modernization that packs an emotional punch, relates to the times we live in and is just plain great entertainment. And no way should you miss the opportunity to see Ralph Fiennes and company show how Shakespeare can be at its best.

The Downside: Frankly, I can’t honestly think of anything. I’m sure there are flaws somewhere in the film, but I was too absorbed to find them.

On the Side: It was a fight for Fiennes to get funding for Coriolanus. In the world of film Coriolanus was made for less than the amount usually paid to one movie star, around just eight million dollars.


Grade:
A+

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.

http://www.filmcritic.com/reviews/2011/coriolanus/