"Coriolanus": Another Unnecessary Shakespeare Adaptation

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Embarcadero Center Cinema

1 Embarcadero Center (at Davis)
San Francisco, CA 94111

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: Embarcadero

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Rated R. Opens Friday at the Embarcadero.

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More About

• Ralph Fiennes
• Coriolanus (Movie)
• William Shakespeare
• Vanessa Redgrave
• Rome (Italy)

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Updating Shakespeare seems doubly condescending: the implication that we need help relating to the text, and that the text needs to be made relevant. In the case of Ralph Fiennes's adaptation of Coriolanus — a knotty tragedy about a warrior who refuses to kowtow to the perceived inferiors who control his fate — the modern setting is confusing and counterproductive, dulling the impact of an otherwise fierce, often unbearably immediate production. (However remote Rome in fifth century B.C. might be, it can't be as disorienting as a modern urban sniper fight that culminates in a mano-a-mano, "Beat It"-style blade tussle.) What saves the film is actor Fiennes's steadfastness to the character of Caius Martius Coriolanus, an irreducible antihero balancing a defiant integrity with damning pride. Fiennes doesn't understate the general's monstrosity — he sports frightful facial scars and barks at commoners through exaggeratedly pursed lips — but his physicality complements rather than obscures the Bard's blunt dialogue. ("Make you a sword of me." "Anger's my meat.") As blood rival Tullus Aufidius, Gerard Butler's all surface, a beard with a Scottish brogue, leaving Brian Cox and Vanessa Redgrave to remind us how it's done. They make every line seem personally conceived, surprising yet inevitable, and in the process, reaffirm that exquisitely articulated words are where the drama is.