Shakespeare’s big, boofy, bovver boy, CORIOLANUS(MA) gets a big screen workout in Ralph Fiennes’s fine film which he both directs and takes the lead role.

Balkanising without bowdlerising the bard, Fiennes has made a remarkably contemporary movie that illustrates the timelessness of Shakespeare’s stories and his insights into human nature.

Political extremism, political expediency and political compromise conspire against Coriolanus, a man born to rule, his courage and victory on the battlefield bolstering that self evident right, but whose disdain of power broking, political manipulation and pragmatism is frustrating to the point of fatal anathema.

Fiennes’s spittle spraying soldier is in direct contrast to the suave suited politicians whose back stabbing character assassinations are no less vile than Coriolanus’ slaughter of insurgents on the war torn streets and certainly less honourable. His frustrations at political rule, all talk and blather rather than appropriate action, are fueled by the fact that his mother, Volumnia, is pushing him to secure high political office.

Behind every great man there is a controlling and ambitious mother and Vanessa Redgrave’s performance is pure patrician power player complete with military haute couture and haughty demeanour.

As Coriolanus’ political mentor, Menenius, Brian Cox gives us a consummate numbers man, sensitive to his candidate and the electorate, feeling his protégé’s discomfort while juggling political protocol.

Coriolanus’ great tragedy is that both his greatness and his folly lie in the fact that he cannot adapt. Bred as a war machine, he is redundant in peacetime, leaving room for lesser men, cockroaches of no conviction to scuttle in and bore their way into power.

© Richard Cotter

6th March, 2012

Tags: Sydney Movie Reviews- CORIOLANUS, Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox.