The Lonely Dragon - "Coriolanus (2011)"

In proportion to its merit, Coriolanus is possibly Shakespeare's most neglected play. It is rarely staged, and one wonders how often it is read except by scholars and students. Its relative unpopularity can undoubtedly be attributed in part to the fact that its hero, who dominates its action no less than the Prince of Denmark does that of Hamlet, is not a general favorite, is indeed, repellent to not a few readers.

-Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare Volume 2

In 2011, a film version of Shakespeare's Roman tragedy Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, was given a limited theatrical release in major US cities.  The next year it came out on home media at which point I snapped it up because I actually really like the play and I was intrigued by the film's decision to put the story in a pseudo-late-90s-Balkan-Wars setting.

For some reason I was recently thinking about Coriolanus and I decided it was worth revisiting both the play text and the 2011 film.

The TL;DR summary is that I think this movie kind of rules, being both a good film and a valuable piece of media as it's an adaptation of a play that is rarely performed.  If you want to see Coriolanus, this is the easiest way.

The disclaimer here is that I love Shakespeare, I'm familiar the cadence of his blank verse, and I know the play decently well.  How does the film come through to someone not familiar with the source material?  I obviously can't really answer that.  For whatever it's worth, Coriolanus (2011) was very well received critically, with a 92% critic rating, but not very well by the general viewer.  The audience score is like 58%.

(Remember, Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator site, a 92% doesn't mean critics gave it an A- grade, it means that 92% of the reviews were at least somewhat positive.  It doesn't distinguish between a B- and an A+ review.  Both count as positive.)

Since Coriolanus (2011) didn't have a wide theatrical release and it's kind of a niche thing, it's hard to say how big the general viewership even was.  A quick cruise through the audience reviews shows that most people's hangups were with the Shakespearean language, which is understandable.  (Though some of those reviews were maddening; see the Gallimaufry for an example.)

All in all I would say if you like Shakespeare or if you're willing to consider liking Shakespeare I would unhesitatingly recommend it, though if you're in the latter camp, the film, like any Shakespeare, requires some concentration to get the most out of.  No "second screen viewing" on this one.

The Play

Note: Play citations will be in act.scene.line format.  So 4.6.115 would be Act 4, scene 6, line 115.

Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote Coriolanus in about 1608.  It was his last major tragedy and, of Shakespeare's 36 plays published in the First Folio, it came after all the ones a non-nerd is likely to have heard of.  (Expect The Tempest.)

Shakespeare's source was Plutarch's Parallel Lives, a moralistic biography of paired Greek and Roman historical figures written in the first century by.... um, Plutarch.  The play is set very shortly after the Romans kicked out their king and established the Roman Republic, so we're looking at 500 BCE or so.  Rome was still small time then, not much more than a city-state surrounded by enemies.

A quick note about the social / political system will make what follows easier to understand.  Rome during the time of the play had two casts, the patricians and the plebeians.  The patricians were the nobility that had most of the money, could be members of the Senate, and could serve in the highest offices.  The plebeians were everyone else though they did have two tribunes to represent them and these tribunes actually had some power to check the patricians, who otherwise controlled the government.

The highest office in the Republic was the consulship.  Rome elected two consuls each year from the patrician caste, though the candidates also required the approval of the plebeians

"Leave nothing out for length" - Plot Summary

The plot of Coriolanus is, like it's protagonist, rather straightforward.   Roman patrician Caius Martius, freshly victorious from a battle with the neighboring Volscians where he performed incredible feats, stands to be made consul.  Given his martial deeds in service of the state Martius, now dubbed Coriolanus, should be a shoe in, but he hates the plebeians and they hate him.  He wins their support, barely, but the plebeians' tribunes convince the people to revoke their approval.  Martius loses his mind, shouts all manner of not nice things, draws his sword in the public marketplace, and then gets declared traitor by the plebs and is banished from Rome.

Out for revenge he joins his Volscian enemy Tullus Aufidius and leads the Volscian army to Rome, rejecting all pleas for mercy from his former countrymen.  He relents at the very end when his mother, his wife, and his son travel to his camp and appeal to him.  He tries to make peace between Rome and the Volscians but the latter murder him instead.  The end

For a plot that's a pretty straight line from beginning to end, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening.  (It is Shakespeare, after all.)  One of the things I like about this play is the multiplicity of modes it has.  The Act 1 battle scene in Corioles is pretty badass.  The political maneuverings of Act 2 are compelling and feel very realistic.  Act 3 is tense and Coriolanus's blinding fury is really powerful.  The fear of his former comrades over what Coriolanus has become is palpable and I find the scene where his family changes his mind to be genuinely affecting.

And there is a lot of good ambivalence, here.  This is a play that invites you to ask yourself who you think is right.  Or at least more right and I'm hard pressed to think of another Shakespeare play that has this much ambiguity as to the fundamental nature of the characters and the events.  I'll get into this later but there's a lot of space for interpretation by both the performers and the audience.

As Marjorie Garber put it in Shakespeare After All:

Like all Shakespearean plays, Coriolanus tells several different kinds of stories at once, depending upon which set of characters and issues is placed in the foreground. In this play the various levels are exceptionally clear, and exceptionally evenhanded, which is one reason why the play has been so successfully staged and appropriated across the political spectrum.

"He is himself alone" - Coriolanus the Character

In the Great Courses lecture series Shakespeare: The Word and the Action, Peter Saccio briefly discusses how the Aristotelian theory of tragedy, where drama springs from a fatal flaw in the hero, is generally not very useful when looking at Shakespeare's work.  His great tragic heroes and their circumstances tend to be too complicated to boil down to a singular trait.

This isn't really the case for Coriolanus, though.  Per Saccio:

In this comparatively simple situation, Aristotle's theory of tragedy really does work.  It's a useful key to open this play. Coriolanus is the only Shakespearean tragedy where that is the case. There is a single tragic flaw in the hero.  The hero is proud.  Pride lies in his very essence. It is the source of his virtue of his service to the state, which is, indeed, great.  It is central to his bond with his mother, which turns out to be the key human tie in his life. ... Pride is also his chief weakness, and directly responsible for his downfall. That is, pride is not only a strongly marked characteristic in the man, it is also key to the plot, to the causal chain that animates the action of the play.

I find Coriolanus to be a surprisingly compelling protagonist despite how unpleasant he can be and how uncomplicated and unreflective he is.  Hamlet he is not.  He does not contain multitudes.

What I think is really interesting about his singular pride is how it manifests and what it implies about him.  His pride is not fed by compliments or boasts or acquisition and he even rejects the physical spoils of war.  He seems to resent his honor and quality being defined by anyone but himself.  (Well, or his forceful mother, Volumnia, but I'll get to her.)

Coriolanus scoffs at having to lower himself to ask for the approval of the plebeians but he also can't bear to hear praise from the patricians, saying at his nomination for consul:

I had rather have my wounds to heal again

Than hear say how I got them.

- 2.2.78-80

He is his own thing and almost exists apart from his society.  As Saccio points out:

The word ‘alone’ occurs more often in this play than any other play of Shakespeare’s and its always associated with the hero.

Coriolanus even describes himself as a "lonely dragon" in Act 4.  But this is not a source of angst for Coriolanus.  He has almost an anti-character arc where, as the play progresses, he loses more and more of his humanity.  "Loses" isn't even the right word as it is his deliberate choice.

In his own words, he wishes to

but stand 

As if a man were author of himself,

And knew no other kin.

-5.3.40-41

Even at the beginning of the play he's described with language that sets him apart from humanity.  At Corioles he calls for the troops to use him as a tool of destruction with "make you a sword of me." (1.6.95)  When Cominius relates his deeds he calls him a "thing of blood." (2.2.125)

That last statement could just be a flowery turn of phrase but it keeps happening throughout the play.  His former Volscian enemy Aufidius calls him a "noble thing," (4.5.129), his former friend Menenius when describing Coriolanus's march on Rome at the head of the Volscians, calls him "a thing made for Alexander" (5.4.22), and his other friend Cominius says:

He is their god; he leads them like a thing

Made by some other deity than Nature

-4.6.115-116

That kind of reference to Coriolanus as something more than human recurs a lot late in the play.  He is compared to a god by multiple characters.  For example, from Menenius:

What he bids be done is finished with

 his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity

 and a heaven to throne in.

-5.4.23-35

This new godhood appears to be the final rupture of Coriolanus's link to his fellow man.  As Cominius says in one of my favorite passages:

“Coriolanus”

He would not answer to, forbade all names.

He was a kind of nothing, titleless,

Till he had forged himself a name o’ th’ fire

Of burning Rome.

-5.1.12-16

But, of course, Coriolanus's apotheosis is averted when he relents to his entreating family and reclaims his humanity, once again becoming son, husband, and father.  With humanity, though, comes mortality and the Volscians kill him for his mercy.

"Of all the voices that we have procured" - Politics

Politics are so integral to this play that it almost feels dumb to point it out.  Act 1 scene 1 starts with a bread riot for God's sake.

Clare Kinney, in her Great Courses series Shakespeare's Tragedies says of Coriolanus that:

It's perhaps one of Shakespeare's most political plays in the sense that the body politic, the community as a whole, is on view almost throughout the action. ... This is emphatically a play of public life. We have few scenes in private spaces. We never see Coriolanus at home alone with his wife, Virgilia.  We rarely see him make a non-public utterance. He has only two soliloquies in the play, one of them very short.  We see very few of his private thoughts.

Coriolanus has what Marjorie Garber calls an "uncanny modernity" to it.  The discourse of Coriolanus, both in terms of the public rhetoric and the private dealings, echoes the discourse I've seen in the United States 400 years later.

Silver tongued politicians use lots of words to say very little.  When Menenius tries to head off the bread riot, where starving plebeians are on their way to confront the grain-hoarding patricians, he gives his famous (for this play, anyway) "belly speech:"

 Your most grave belly was deliberate,

 Not rash like his accusers, and thus answered:

 “True is it, my incorporate friends,” quoth he,

 “That I receive the general food at first

 Which you do live upon; and fit it is,

 Because I am the storehouse and the shop

 Of the whole body. But, if you do remember,

 I send it through the rivers of your blood

 Even to the court, the heart, to th’ seat o’ th’ brain;

 And, through the cranks and offices of man,

 The strongest nerves and small inferior veins

 From me receive that natural competency

 Whereby they live.

- 1.1.135-147

This description the rich as the belly of the body politic is the same trickle down economics argument that is still being made today.

The public is fickle and susceptible to manipulation.  A Senate officer says, in a perceptive line:

’Faith, there hath been many great

men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved

them; and there be many that they have loved they

know not wherefore; so that, if they love they

know not why, they hate upon no better a ground.

-2.2.7-11

Individuals are shown to be reasonable, only to get swept up into a mob at the urging of demagogues who weaponize their fears and rile them with incendiary language:

SICINIUS

You are at point to lose your liberties.

Martius would have all from you, Martius,

Whom late you have named for consul.

MENENIUS

Fie, fie, fie!

 This is the way to kindle, not to quench.

- 3.1.243-247

(I will say that for all Coriolanus's many faults, he is not a demagogue.  His venom is completely sincere and he makes no effort to manipulate or persuade anyone.)

All of this makes Coriolanus feel very prescient and realistic.  There are no supernatural elements at work here, unlike in Plutarch's version.   As Saccio says:

There are no dark mysteries. This play takes place in broad daylight, in the broad daylight of the Forum, or the broad daylight of the battlefield.

"The wife of Hercules" - Volumnia

For me the second most memorable character in Coriolanus is easily his mother Volumnia.  Coriolanus himself sums her up perfectly, saying to her:

If you had been the wife of Hercules,

Six of his labors you’d have done and saved

Your husband so much sweat.

- 4.1.21-23

Volumnia is a formidable, strong willed, and intelligent character who can do the impossible: get Coriolanus to change his mind.  She by turns uses deft political arguments, analogies to military strategy, and just straight up emotional blackmail to cajole him.

She is the pivotal figure in both the scene where Coriolanus goes back to the forum to apologize to the plebeians to salvage his consulship bid and the scene where Coriolanus relents in his attack on Rome.  It's hard to judge her for her emotional manipulations in the play; in the first instance he was being an idiot and the second was life or death for so many people.

It's less hard to judge her for Coriolanus turning out the way he did.  The code she inculcated him with leads her to say stuff like this:

had I a dozen sons, each in my

 love alike and none less dear than thine and my

 good Martius, I had rather had eleven die nobly

 for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out

 of action.

- 1.3.23-26

Or this:

The breasts of Hecuba,

 When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier

 Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood

 At Grecian sword, contemning.

- 1.3.43-46

Which...Jesus.   

And her approving reaction to a pretty disturbing story about her young grandson shows that her instruction didn't stop with Coriolanus.

I really like her last salvo to her son in Act 5 when she turns to go back to a doomed Rome:

This fellow had a Volscian to his mother,

His wife is in Corioles, and his child

Like him by chance.—Yet give us our dispatch.

I am hushed until our city be afire,

And then I’ll speak a little.

- 5.3.200-204

This is the coup de grace that makes Coriolanus relent.

Points of Interest

Seriously, I'm about to get to the film, but I just wanted to discuss a couple more things about the play as they are ideas I was thinking about while watching the movie adaptation.

"The deeds of Coriolanus should not be uttered feebly" - Framing and Response

As I alluded to earlier, Coriolanus can support a lot of different interpretations.  In Shakespeare after All, Garber puts it this way:

Thus Aristotelian tragic readings, class and materialist analyses, and psychoanalytic interpretations - to give just a few examples out of a host of possibilities - can readily coexist, one or the other taking precedence as the reader's, actor's, director's, or teacher's focus changes. None is intrinsically "wrong" or "right" (though in practice some are more convincing than others), and the play-text does not privilege one point of view over another, though any single interpretation may do so. What has been especially striking about productions and citations of this play is the way it has been appropriated, consistently over the years, as a commentary on a current political situation, and on issues of morality, ethics, social responsibility, and individual virtue in politics.

The text of Coriolanus on its own gives little guidance as to what we're supposed to think of all this.  Saccio sums this up neatly:

But if the hero is comparatively simple, the responses he provokes in the audience are not. ... I could say that Coriolanus, although obviously flawed, is essentially virtuous, noble and admirable. He's a good man, caught in a situation of conflict and destroyed by it.  I think I could defend that position. I could certainly summon a fair amount of evidence to support it. I could easily defend the opposite position, that Coriolanus is a haughty, savage, bloody brute. There's plenty of evidence to back that up, too. Neither view is intrinsically ludicrous. ...

But Coriolanus can be placed with the sheep or the goats. ...  He is difficult to judge.

And yet, the play about him is constantly asking us to judge him.

Reading the play, part of me wants to shake Coriolanus and say "Come on you fucking baby just act nice for like 5 minutes and you'll get the consulship" but another part of me thinks "Honestly, kind of glad he doesn't get the most powerful position in Rome and it's a good thing that he's unable to lie."

The play has a lot of flexibility built into it, and given how modern or perhaps true-across-time the interactions feel, the framing of the events and characters in a performance is going to hugely influence the effect on the audience.

Are the patricians fascist brutes oppressing the proletariat or are they right to not trust power to the fickle mob?   Should Coriolanus's service to the state in war give him greater claim to civll power?  Who is a "real Roman," the patricians or the plebeians or both?

Well... it depends on the execution.

To quote Saccio again:

Audiences tend to respond to this play with the very same political passions that the play examines.  In a liberal age, Coriolanus will be seen as a potential dictator.  In a conservative age he will be seen as a noble aristocrat who is done in by the rabble.      

"Action is eloquence"

Coriolanus is what Clare Kinney calls "the terminator in a toga" and most of Act 1 is a battle at the Volscian city of Corioles.  (I only glancingly mentioned this before but Caius Martius, per Roman custom, is given the title "Coriolanus" because of his heroism at the battle of Corioles.  He is "Martius" in the text until he gets his new name, and then Coriolanus for the rest of the play.)

As with all Shakespeare, the play is light on stage direction.   For example, Martius getting trapped in the enemy city alone and then fighting his way back out is handled in just two stage directions:

Martius follows the fleeing Volsces through the gates, and is shut in.

And then about 20 lines later:

Enter Martius, bleeding, as if from Corioles, assaulted by the enemy.

And that's it.  The visualization of all this is up to the director, the crew, and the performers.

The Film

"Which is his house, beseech you" - The Setting

As I mentioned earlier the setting for this adaptation evokes the Balkans in the late 90s.  The grainy news footage and the frequent pundit commentary and news chyrons is very reminiscent of what I remember watching on CNN during the Kosovo War, fought from 1998 to 1999.

Looking at the film through the lens of the Kosovo War, the Romans are coded as the Serbian led Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Volscians are coded as the Albanian separatist militia the Kosovo Liberation Army.  It's certainly not a direct 1 to 1 parallel but, as someone who remembers this event, the coding definitely affected the framing.  (More on this later.)

It's a pretty... overcast movie.  The skies are always grey and it looks chilly all the time.  It was actually filmed in the Balkans which is why it looks like the Balkans.  The non news-footage sections have a very grounded and unglamorous aesthetic.  The Volscians, for example, all look like shit, like they've been sleeping outside for the past week, which in the reality of this film, they probably have been doing.

There really isn't any weirdness because of the update to a modern setting.  The prescience of the political wrangling means it's not jarring to see in a boardroom what in the play is in a public square and the update to modern weapons didn't cause any suspension of disbelief issues. There wasn't much need to inject contrivance to justify why no one actually dies in a firefight.

The counter example here is something like Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) where the play opens on a large street brawl where everyone is shooting at each other but no one is allowed to actually get hurt.  In Coriolanus during the big gunfight in Corioles lots and lots of people are killed.  The play only has one non-fatal fight between named characters, a duel between Martius and Aufidius in Act 1, and the film does a good job of justifying why they their personal enmity and honor makes them lay down their guns and fight with knives and it finds a non-awkward way to separate the combatants before anyone is mortally wounded.  (An incoming bomb hits near them and they get blown away from each other then dragged off by their men.)

"A good construction" - Filmmaking

I think this movie looks pretty good.  It's shot handheld and wobbles a bit.  Your mileage may vary on this but shaky came doesn't usually bother me unless it's completely unmotivated or really egregious.

The way the film uses news chyrons as exposition is a nice wordless touch and isn't overdone.   This gets a lot of setup out of the way without having to have a character say it out loud.  It's generally realistic headlines over silent news footage, like "General Martius Suspends Civil Liberties" over a press conference or "Ancient Volscian Border Dispute Flares" over Aufidius's convoy rolling past the camera.    

There's some good visual storytelling which tells me that this adaptation was done with great care by people who knew the play well.  I really liked how in Martius's first bruising fight with Aufidius, they end up exhaustedly holding each other up, almost like they are embracing which is a visual foreshadow of the scene in Antium where they join forces and literally embrace.  This image comes back again at the very end when Aufidius, looking in the wounded Coriolanus's eyes while holding him on his feet, stabs him in the back.

In that second instance in Antium, there's a nice touch while Aufidius says:

Here I clip

 The anvil of my sword and do contest

 As hotly and as nobly with thy love

 As ever in ambitious strength I did

 Contend against thy valor.

While he says this there's a deliberate cut to a close-up of the knife in Aufidius's hand while they embrace.  He had drawn it to cut Coriolanus's offered throat before changing his mind and accepting him, but that close up prefigures his later threatening words to himself:

When, Caius, Rome is thine,

 Thou art poor’st of all; then shortly art thou mine.

There's also a cool scene of the Volscian soldiers under Coriolanus's command ecstatically shaving their heads to mimic their new leader's look.  It a good way to show something that the lieutenant in the play just says, that:

 I do not know what witchcraft’s in him, but

 Your soldiers use him as the grace ’fore meat,

 Their talk at table, and their thanks at end;

There's a couple of scenes where the camerawork, the editing, and a low drone ambient score, injects some real tension.  The scene where Coriolanus goes to seek the voices of the plebeians is genuinely suspenseful.  The film takes it time getting him to the forum and there's no dialog; it feels like the movie is holding its breath in anticipation of a very dangerous moment.

"It is a part that I shall blush in acting" - The Performances

The acting is really good in this.  I'm not surprised that extremely experienced Shakespearean interpreter and highly acclaimed actor Ralph Fiennes was excellent but I was in fact surprised that Gerard Butler was pretty good as Aufidius.  Maybe it's just that he's not in very many good movies so it's hard to give him a fair shake as an actor.  I liked him in this.

Fiennes's Coriolanus has this almost baleful intensity and he speaks carefully, quietly, and almost dismissively like he resents even having to talk to anyone.  Which is kind of perfect for the character.  There are no asides (not that play Coriolanus has many anyway), no voice over, and a lot of his dialog has been excised so he's hard to get a read on, in the best possible way.  He's withholding and kind of unknowable for long stretches.  A lonely dragon.

And when he does explode in fury at the tribunes and the plebeians Fiennes really cuts loose and the contrast to his earlier control is shocking; like Moby Dick his "quietude is but the vesture of tornados."

A standout moment for me was when he goes to the plebeians to get their approval for his consulship.  Fiennes's lips twitched just a bit when asking the crowd for voices, like he was uncomfortable in the asking or maybe the kind words tasted bitter in his mouth and he had a slight glint of contempt in his eyes.  There was also a touch of ambiguity.  This was probably the first time he'd had any positive interactions with the plebeians and it could be interpreted that his discomfort was because his prejudices were under strain.  Just a fantastic acting scene.

Also not surprisingly, Vanessa Redgrave knocked it out of the park as Volumnia.  The roles of Menenius and Cominius are really cut down but Brian Cox and John Kani were both really good.  Jessica Chastain as Coriolanus's wife Virgilia was fine in a part that, like in the play, doesn't get to do much.

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action" - Adaptational Stuff

The film makes good use of film language and manages to be true to the story without feeling like a stage version someone pointed a camera at.  There's nothing necessarily wrong with a movie like that but it wouldn't take full advantage of the film medium's strengths. There are some dialog shuffles that allow two scenes to be intercut together which allows a stronger sense of simultaneity which then tamps down on the stage-y feel of it and works better with the lower suspension of disbelief inherent to film.  It also makes the movie have more standard filmic pacing rather than theatrical pacing.

In a play, and especially in Elizabethan theater where the performances were on a bare stage in broad daylight, you need a person to walk on stage and describe what the audience should be imagining.  In a film you obviously don't and this film cuts lines that are unnecessary considering the realistic setting and visuals.   

The film also makes good use of montage to quickly establish the world, like in the opening news footage of civil unrest in Rome, or to show the passage of time, like post banishment Coriolanus's journey to Antium to join the Volscians which is shown to have taken months.

"Make you a sword of me" - The Action

The action scene in Corioles is handled well and it evokes the stage direction "Martius follows the fleeing Volsces through the gates, and is shut in" in an urban combat context without directly replicating it.  During an assault on a building where the Volscians are holed up, Martius and his squad are knocked down on the street by an exploding booby trap.  Martius rises and, the rest of his squad either too wounded or too afraid to move, goes ahead alone.   

Unlike the play, where we don't see what Martius does behind the gates and he just emerges later covered in blood, the film shows him going room to room.

Martius single- handedly clearing the building is tense and he feels like he is in grave danger the entire time.  He starts with his rifle, then goes to his pistol after running out of rifle ammunition, then gets drawn into a brutal knife fight when his ammo again runs low.  By the end of the knife fight he is the "thing of blood" the play describes him as.    

His knife duel with Aufidius is also pretty well choreographed and the film even does a decent job of convincing me that Ralph Fiennes could actually beat up Gerard Butler.  I also like how it devolves from a controlled combat into an unromanticized slugfest before they get separated.

This film also makes the interesting choice to have riot police under Martius's command beat up the protesters en mass in front of the grain storage at the beginning.   Menenius is not there to try to calm the crowd; the agents of the state initiate the violence.

"But thou wilt frame thyself, forsooth, hereafter theirs" - Framing

The film frames Martius and the state as more unambiguously in the wrong.  The opening montage shows the headline "General Martius Suspends Civil Liberties" and emphasizes the state violence against the commoners.  As I just mentioned, the confrontation between the plebeians and Martius happens at a grain storage site and no one on the government side tries to de-escalate before the police start attacking the unarmed crowd.

During Martius's much abbreviated statement to the plebians, the film pointedly cuts to a commoner with blood all over him which highlights the asymmetry of the conflict. The plebeians are then scattered by the riot police intimidatingly beating their batons on their shields and advancing in a phalanx.  The power of the state is shown to be dark and threatening.

The fact that the Romans are coded as the Serbians under genocidal dictator Slobodan Milošević only heightens this framing.

The plebeians aren't exactly a whipped up mob, either; they are a self-organized protest trying to get food. They are also not shown fleeing the call to battle when word comes that the Volscian army is approaching and they are not present and shirking their duties at Corioles like in the play.  All this means that one of the things the play asks us to examine, the relative rightness of the plebeians and the patricians, is mostly absent here.  We don't just hear angry plebeians talking amorphously about loss of liberty and Martius being enemy to the people; we see it happen.   

The crowd also reads as less fickle.  Unlike the play, the plebeians don't show up again after the news breaks of Coriolanus marching on Rome and make excuses that they were manipulated and they were all secretly against his banishment the whole time.

The film plebieans aren't placated by Menenius's self serving "belly speech," which has been cut entirely, and without any potential idea of them not holding up their end of citizenship in Rome's wars for survival, their fears about what Coriolanus would do with his power are essentially correct.  The tribunes are pricks, but they're not exactly wrong, here.

There's also no mob of Volscian commoners who get whipped up to kill Coriolanus at the end.   Overall, the film is less public than the play text.

"A kind of nothing" - The Finale

I think the final act of this film, when Coriolanus is marching on Rome, is really good and made some interesting adaptational changes.  After Coriolanus joins Aufidius the film does not show him at all until Menenius makes his entreaty, not in montage, not in the news footage reporting on his invasion, and not on screen.

Like in the earlier scene with Coriolanus journeying to the market to get the plebeians voices, the film doesn't speed through Menenius's journey to Coriolanus's camp and the sequence is ominous and tense.  The reveal of Coriolanus, surrounded by his newly bald Volscian army, is kind of unsettling and Cox looks discomfited.  The way its shot really does make Coriolanus look like a cult leader.

The film also has Coriolanus say almost nothing to Menenius, cutting his fifteen or so lines to about 4, and he does not give Menenius a letter like in the play.  The lines about his former affection for Menenius are cut; Coriolanus just dismisses him.

And as a bonus wise decision, the film moves Menenius's lines about how bad the situation is to immediately after his failed entreaty, rather than having them occur after we've already seen Volumnia succeed.  (Honestly Shakespeare putting those lines where he did always was a little baffling to me.)   Menenius also has way, way fewer post rejection lines, with the film allowing the atmosphere and Cox's devastated acting to convey his despair.  In this version, after returning to Rome, Menenius kills himself, another change I really like.  It all really sells the hopelessness, even if it culls some really striking turns of phrase.

In general, this Coriolanus says far less after his banishment than he does in the play, which I think is a smart decision.  I always found the play's Act 4 scene 1 scene where he has a few long speeches to say goodbye to his mother and wife and has some kind words for Cominius and Menenius to be a little at odds with the next time we see him, when he swears revenge on Rome.  This doesn't happen in the film.  After his "I banish you" speech he just leaves and there is only one very brief line in flashback to Volumnia where he calling himself the lonely dragon.  We next see him wordlessly making his way to Antium to find Aufidius.

This all means that film Coriolanus's transition to "a kind of nothing" happens earlier and more viscerally than it does in the play.

The film also excises a lot from the scene where Volumnia and Virgilia plead for Rome.  Unlike the play, Coriolanus has no asides to reveal what he's thinking and he says very little.  Fiennes plays this really well, and via his facial acting you can see the cracks start to form and see him struggling to be someone who could say "Wife, mother, child, I know not."   

Vanessa Redgrave is phenomenal here too, of course.

The very end of the story is simplified.  As I said above there's no Volscian mob.  Coriolanus is instead killed by his Volscian soldiers in the middle of a checkpoint between Roman and Volscian territory.  The film audio fades out for Aufidius's final blow and there are no lines after the killing, just the wind blowing over Coriolanus dead body on the road.

It's bleak, but really effective.

Gallimaufry

• In Plutarch's Parallel Lives, the story of Coriolanus is paired with the Athenian general Alcibiades who lived from circa 450 to 404 BCE.  Alcibiades fought in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta which lasted to 431 to 404 BCE.  Alcibiades defected to Sparta and then to the Persians.  (Sparta won the war.)

• In preparation for the movie I listened to the Arkangel Shakespeare audio version.  Like all of Arkangel's productions it's really good. (Fair warning: Steve Hodson as Brutus sounds enough like Michael N. Harbour's Cominius that Act V scene 1 was confusing for a second.)  Arkangel Shakespeare has recorded unabridged versions of all Shakespeare's plays and they have great casts with some recognizable names like David Tennant, Ciarin Hinds, and Damian Lewis.  They're all available as audiobooks on Audible and you can still find the CDs if you look a bit.  They're worth checking out.

• For me Volumnia is right up there with Margaret of Anjou from the Henry VI plays in terms of  really compelling and capable women calling the shots in a patriarchal culture.  (Margaret is one of my favorite Shakespeare characters.)

• The film seems to have used a lot of locals when filming on location in the Balkans, which is pretty cool.

• For my money, Coriolanus has the best "you can't fire me I quit" speech in English literature.  After being banished from Rome by the plebeians, Coriolanus says:

You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate

 As reek o’ th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize

 As the dead carcasses of unburied men

 That do corrupt my air, I banish you!

 And here remain with your uncertainty;

 Let every feeble rumor shake your hearts;

 Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,

 Fan you into despair! Have the power still

 To banish your defenders, till at length

 Your ignorance—which finds not till it feels,

 Making but reservation of yourselves,

 Still your own foes—deliver you

 As most abated captives to some nation

 That won you without blows! Despising

 For you the city, thus I turn my back.

 There is a world elsewhere.

- 3.3.150-165

• There's 11 production companies listed in the wikipedia entry for Coriolanus (2011).  I don't know what that implies, but one of them is called "Lonely Dragon" which is a nice touch.

• In keeping with the Volscians being coded as the insurgents, they all used AK-47s, the preferred weapon of cash strapped militias all over the world.  The better equipped Romans used what looked to me like M27s, the current standard issue US Marine rifle.  I could be wrong about that, though; I'm not a gun guy.

• Film Coriolanus manages to kill three Volscians and leave another wounded before being killed at the end.  I suspect they really weren't enthusiastic to fight him hand to hand.

• One of the one-star user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes said "Not too familiar with this vernacular, so it sucked."   Sigh.  It's a Shakespeare movie, dude, what did you expect?  If I'm being charitable I could interpret that as "the experience sucked" but I think that's meeting them more than halfway.

There's a quote by Picasso that I really like:

I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?

The aforementioned Rotten Tomatoes review is the opposite of what Picasso said.

• Coriolanus's line calling the tribune Sicinius the "Triton of the minnows" is a good burn.

• I really like Menenius's line after he is turned away by Coriolanus near the end:

     he no more remembers

his mother now than an eight-year-old horse. (5.4.16-17)

(He's wrong, but it's a good line.)

• Marjorie Garber called Coriolanus a play that is "so directly about language and the ability to speak (or not speak)"   The word "voices" is said 23 times in this play.  Coriolanus rejects the plebeians' words but is forced to ask for them and he meets Roman entreaties with silence.  He breaks his silence when his mother says:

 I am hushed until our city be afire,

 And then I’ll speak a little.

-5.3.203-204

(There's an implication here that she is going to curse him.)

• As is par for the course with Shakespeare's historical plays Coriolanus has lots of anachronisms.  Coriolanus gets compared to Alexander the Great and Cato the Elder, despite predating the former by more than a century and the latter by more than two.

• In Act 3 scene 2 Coriolanus goes from "Well I must do it" to "I will not do 't" in like 11 lines.  Hamlet, Macbeth, or Julius Caesar's Brutus would have taken an entire act to make that turn.

• Another prescient banger from the citizenry:

Care for us? True, indeed! They ne’er15

cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their

storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for

usury to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome

act established against the rich, and provide

more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain

the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will;

and there’s all the love they bear us.

- 1.1.81-87

There's nothing new under the sun, it seems.  Human nature, amirite?

• There is a noblewoman in the play named Valeria that only has about 40 lines, almost all of which are confined to Act 1, scene 3.  The film shifts her lines to Menenius which is a good change, though it's kind of funny that she's still present in the scene where Coriolanus is convinced to spare Rome.  It's play accurate but for this film, like, who is that person and why is she standing there?

Conclusion

This is a good movie and a good adaptation, which makes me happy because there's not a lot of Coriolani to choose from.

I just wish I wasn't the only person I know who's seen it.

If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there

That like an eagle in a dovecote, I

Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles,

Alone I did it.

- 5.6.135-138

-m