If “Coriolanus” were by Bill Schwartz instead of Bill Shakespeare, it would be in about its 400th consecutive year of not being performed. Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.
A snarling and bullet-headed Fiennes plays Caius Martius, later called Coriolanus, the Roman general who reluctantly turns political leader, then turns his back on the grubby masses, joins Rome’s rebel enemies the Volscians and is finally slain after getting his traitor card stamped on both sides.
Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan’s tired idea is to run all this through the prism of the contemporary media, so we’re constantly being fed the story via TV interviews, news channels, news-ticker updates and so on. The effect is much like observing an earnest 10th-grade teacher flailing valiantly in an attempt to convince the kids that Shakespeare was the first gangsta rapper. Or maybe “Macbeth” was really “Scarface” in kilts?
Moreover, the film, though stocked with good actors and also Gerard Butler, is shot with an aggressive ugliness — the lighting is flat and lackluster, the palette encompassing all the colors of the rainbow from beige to brown. Like many another actor turned director, Fiennes likes to let the cast (including Vanessa Redgrave as the mother and Jessica Chastain as the wife) feast on long, long takes. Despite considerable trims, the film is, like its title character, stubborn and exhausting.
Who is Coriolanus really? Four centuries on, he’s still less a tragic figure than a rigid, humorless jerk motivated not by love of country but by disdain for society. If there is greatness in him, we never see it. Instead he peers down his eagle’s nose at the wretched rabble like a cross between the patrician soldier Douglas MacArthur and the mindless news reader Katie Couric, who once called Americans outside of the media capitals “this great unwashed middle of the country,” then insisted she intended no derogation.
Irritability and contempt don’t make you a hero or even an antihero; they just make you a pain in the ass. If Shakespeare managed to deliver some sense of MacArthur’s Henry V-worthy genius for leadership — or even Couric’s decayed cuteness! — we’d be able to locate the humanity and take a rooting interest in Caius Martius as he rises and falls, regardless of whether we like him. The movie is nearly over when a defender, Menenius (Brian Cox), says, “He has wings; he is more than a creeping thing.” The gentleman doth protest too much; were this true, we would have realized it long beforehand. It wouldn’t be necessary to tell us.