It’s dangerous to underestimate modern-day reinterpretations of Shakespeare, a la Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, not because Shakespeare necessarily needs to be modernized, but because it’s astonishing how much retooling, rejiggering and restuffing he can withstand: His work is like a magic carpet bag that never gets filled up or worn out.
So I was curious about Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut, Coriolanus, in which Fiennes himself stars as Caius Martius Coriolanus, the uppity Roman general who finds himself in a pickle when the hungry people of Rome, suffering from a food shortage, decree that their plight is his fault. Proud of his military service and disdainful of those who haven’t similarly fought for their country, he denounces the poor, hungry masses, accusing them of, among other things, having bad breath. That plunges Coriolanus into a public-relations nightmare from which he can’t recover, the beginning of the end.
When I saw Coriolanus at the Berlin Film Festival last February, no one I talked to — not even the random sampling of the British critics I know — had actually read the play. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have read it. But now that I’ve seen Fiennes’s version, I have some idea why the material doesn’t always find its way into the basic curriculum: It’s kind of a dud. No wonder it was the butt of an old Saturday Night Live joke, in which Robin Williams plays a Shakespearean stand-up who,…
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