CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW.

CORIOLANUS (Three and a Half Stars)

U.K.: Ralph Fiennes, 2011 (The Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay)“Oh mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The Gods look down, and this unnatural scene,

They laugh at!”

Coriolanus,  from the play by William Shakespeare

Here we have another film treasure taken from the vast and wonderful dramaturgy of William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright who ever lived: “Coriolanus,” bitter, bleak, murderous play of the hell of warfare, of deadly comrades in arms, of the masses and the few, of the ties of blood and the evils of politics — now made into a movie set in the age of bombs and the land of ethnic cleansing (Serbia), directed by and starring, in the title role, that fine melancholy actor Ralph Fiennes, with a performance so extraordinary by Vanessa Redgrave, as Volumnia, the ultimate warrior‘s mother, that it takes your breath away to watch her, and to hear her — as it must have staggered Fiennes while he watched and directed and acted with her, and said the words above, with feeling.

Actually, for me, Will Shakespeare was not only the greatest playwright who ever wrote a speech or drew a breath, he was also the greatest of  movie writers, even though he penned his scripts four centuries before the cinema was invented. (Name another writer, from whom so much great cinema has flowed. (Not screenwriters like Ben Hecht, Jacques Prevert or Billy Wilder. Not novelists like Charles Dickens. Ah well, enough of that game.) As a source of cinema, Shakespeare is unrivalled and in Coriolanus, he is as well. It’s one of his later, darker plays — like Troilus and Cressida or the famous tragedies. Not in the same league as Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello or King Lear, but, in a way, as scary and bloody and profound as any of them. More Brechtian maybe, it’s the story of a brave and stubborn Roman career soldier, Caius Martius aka Coriolanus, who is forced onto the stage of politics and destroyed by it, and ruined also by his own fierce intractable nature, and the one soft part of his heart — because he dislikes the masses and cannot help it, and because he loves his mother and cannot help that either.

Shakespeare’s plays can make superb movies, like this one, not only because they’re so teeming with ideas and overflowing with poetry and bursting with life, but because in many ways, they are already movies, ready made — longer perhaps than the average film, but richer and more wondrous too. Fiennes’ Coriolanus — shot in modern clothes with modern weaponry in the recently war-torn city of Belgrade, Serbia , with cable TV newspeople acting as narrator or chorus, and cell phones everywhere — is the kind of modernization I am usually inclined against. Shakespeare with guns never seems to work as well as Shakespeare with swords. Or spears. The first time I saw Baz Luhrmann‘s street gang version of “Romeo and Juliet,” I disliked it. But I was wrong. When you use Shakespeare’s words, the speeches, the people — and you have them mostly here — then you’ve set the table for something grand: a feast of poetry, a feast of humanity, a feast of soul and flesh and beating heart.

And, in Coriolanus, a feast of blood. This is a play of murder, and a movie of killers. Coriolanus is the dread-soaked tale of an ill-fated warrior, who wins battles for Rome against the attacking Volscians, fighting oman people, many of whom he hates. He is then d for Roman consul by his wily friend Menenius (Brian Cox) and his warrior’s mother Volumnia (Redgrave), and outwitted by two rascally demagogic tribunes, Brutus (Paul Jesson) and Sicinius (James Nesbitt) and their radical too-easily-led mobs. Exiled,  the sinewy, bullet-headed bald-shaven Coriolanus, seems to take it stoically, but we can feel the pain reeking from him. He shows up, now with beard and shaggy hair, in the den of the Volscians and of his great brutal rival Aufidius (Gerard Butler). And, SPOILER ALERT be damned, he goes over to the enemy, leads the Volscian troops to victory over his old home city, and then, on the brink of sour revenge, becomes the target of one of the most moving and terrifying speeches a stage mother ever gave — in an acting performance by Redgrave worthy of every award from the Oscar on down. (A pity. She’ll probably never play a better part or scene in a greater role than this.)

The secret of playing Shakespeare, at least in our day, in a more intimate medium like film, is to say the speeches so the poetry shines through and yet say them so naturalistically that the meaning and the humanity come out as well. This is no easy task, but for any good actor, it’s a  joyous one. The stage around them can be as packed or as bare as you like. (Will Shakespeare’s Globe Theater had little scenery but rich costumes.) Here, Fiennes’ Coriolanus-the-movie looks so bleak, so gray, and so bloody — but I didn’t care about that slightly monotonous landscape, because the words were there. And the actors: Fiennes and Redgrave and Cox and Jessica Chastain (as Coriolanus’ pretty wife, Virgilia) and all the others, some English, some Serbian, some from other lands. Shakespeare belongs to them all, to all the world.

Fiennes wanted to preserve his own stage performance of a decade ago, but he also wanted, I’m sure, to share with us his actor’s love of the work of the best of all playwrights, the greatest comical-tragical-historical wordsmith of them all: Bill Shakespeare. What snobbish ass truly thinks the Earl of Oxford, or any other pampered aristocrat in a library wrote those plays? They were written by a man who lived in the theatre, among other actors, who worked before audiences — and anyone who sullies his name or authorship (like the fools behind Anonymous) deserves to be caught on stage without his lines, or better, trapped between a real Coriolanus and Aufidius, their blades or AK47s high and gory, words spitting like flames in the gray cold heavy air.

I used to get angry when I would read those few bad or venomous or sarcastic jibes by “critics” aimed at Shakespeare or his authorship or his qualities as a playwright, hurled or lobbed by iconoclasts from George Bernard Shaw on down. Now I just feel sorry for the prankish empty-heads (except for drama critic Shaw and his blind spot) who make ‘em. I say one thing: More Shakespeare on film, even more. More Midsummer Night’s Dreams, more Hamlets, more Tempests, more Romeos and Juliets, more Cleopatras, more Falstaffs, more Iagos and Othellos, and more Coriolanuses and Volumnias — though Fiennes and Redgrave will be hard to top. The settings modern or in period, or bare bones, or whatever way you will. The flood of words and poetry and humanity is, we know by now, inexhaustible. All the world’s a stage, or a movie set, and all the men and women merely players. (Merely?) The play should never end, the players never bow and exit (stage left, pursued by a bear), the curtain always rise and fall and rise again, ina multiplex as well as the Globe.. Ah drama, comedy, tragedy! The stage, the screen: they never gave us better. Never will.

Extras: Commentary by Ralph Fiennes; “Making Of” Documentary.

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