Ed. note: Coriolanus was originally slated to open in Dallas on Jan 20, but the opening has been pushed back to February. We will update this post when the opening date is set for our area. 

We are told by a screen title that Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut, an adaption of Shakespeare’s play, Coriolanus, takes place in a region “calling itself Rome.” And while the names, places, and references of the movie stay true to the bard’s historic setting, Fiennes has placed the action in a bombed-out contemporary moment, a Balkan-like place (the movie was shot in Serbia) that is improvised and war-torn, yet adorned with European architecture that betrays its historical connection to a crumbling Western culture.

When the movie opens, there are riots because of food shortages, and the soldier Caius Martius (Fiennes) is engaged in fending off outside threats to Rome. The senate first tries to appease the people by agreeing to allow them to elect five consuls to rule the city. The politicians then try to appease Caius Martius, who returns to Rome a war hero, by naming him one of the five. Protocol, however, requires the general to go solicit votes from the commoners in the streets of the marketplace. That act of placation is nearly enough to set Martius, who despises the groveling masses, against his own people, but at the pleading of his mother, Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), he complies. It is an uneasy peace, and it is only a matter of time before the warrior and the populous are again at odds.

To quicken the pace and tackle some of the play’s challenges for the screen, its long speeches and diverse settings, Fiennes roots the action in a world of mass media, with talking heads on televisions framing the dialogue of backroom political dealing. Fiennes tries to leverage Shakespeare to bring some sense to his apocalyptically post-modern setting, a world that plays out the tensions of our time in explicit fashion: class disillusionment taking to the streets in protest and television talk shows literally throwing their victims into exile. But it is hard to upstage Shakespeare, and despite the clever direction, the piece’s goose-bumpy climax is still the long dialogue between Martius and his mother. The warrior is in exile, and Redgrave’s character must again plead with him to spare the city of his birth, Rome, from his vengeance.

Films often muddle or simplify Shakespeare, and aspects of Fiennes’ Coriolanus are both abridged and noisy. But it is also an intriguing choice of play for our current moment. Fiennes unleashes a creature of war, a man, Caius Martius, who challenges our understandings of nobility and justice precisely because his very dignity is rooted in his lust for destruction. He is god-like, achillean by nature, and the part, brilliant realized by Fiennes, sets at odds two visions of government: despotism and democracy. What Fiennes manages to achieve with his Roman revamp is a pealing away of the noise of contemporary discourse to get at the questions that rumble beneath an age in decline, as they are set in the personalities of the characters Shakespeare has created. Coriolanus is a wrestling match, tense and sweaty, that reinterprets both ancient and recent history as a struggle to resolve humanity’s tendencies towards both vulgarity and gentility.