Coriolanus, Berlin Film Festival, review

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.The two best performances come from Brian Cox, making of Menenius a cagey, fatigued diplomat, and Vanessa Redgrave, quite tremendous as Volumnia.

The way she grasps and massages the part, you feel Shakespeare could almost have written it for her: she’s both implacable and hugely moving, advancing with steel in her entreaties and fire in her soul. Bumpy though the film is as a whole, the handful of terrific scenes it gives one of our great actresses means it’s hardly to be sniffed at.

From http://www.telegraph.co.uk