Beard to beard theatrics

Rating: 7/10 (12 June 2020)

Now this is theater! Apart from the silly groan-inducing title card that informs you we're in a sort of parallel Rome, this vigorous attempt to breathe relevance into an obscure and rather opaque Shakesperian tragedy starts off with a pulse-pounding jackboot to the face. Civil unrest! Heavy-handed state oppression! Angry plebes brandishing cellphones and protest posters! Truncheon violence! Mangy revolutionaries huddling in a shabby apartment! ("I've watched enough Pornhub, Rick...")
What follows doesn't quite measure up to the vibrant immediacy conjured by the opening, but it's an ambitious - and more importantly, entertaining! - gamble that actually pays off, especially considering this an A-list actor's directorial debut, which is basically a more forgiving synonym for 'vanity project'. No need to entreat for forgiveness though, because Fiennes performs admirably on both sides of the camera. Looking more Patrick Stewart than the man himself, Fiennes is fully in command of his role - his meat-necked Caius dominates the screen from the first moment we see him dish out a sneering and contemptuous verbal thrashing to a shaggy plebe. You'll never hear the word 'fragments' used with such disdain.
Fiennes also manages to get great performances out of the rest of the cast...although, to be fair, only like four of them have any sort of depth, and a veteran like Redgrave would deliver a knockout performance even if she was being directed by a crushed bedbug.
In the last decade, Coriolanus has enjoyed something of a resurgence in popularity, with various ambitious stage versions getting the ravest of reviews. It's a grim, blood-soaked, and utterly humorless affair about militarism, turmoil, and proto-fascist tendencies. If our world wasn't so fully immersed in such a zeitgeist, I doubt anyone would be getting such mileage out of this play. But besides making the obvious modern-day connections - like...it's filmed in the Balkans, duh - Fiennes does his best to draw out two novel subtexts from it. The first is the relationship dynamic between Caius, his mother, and his wife - I'm sure you can guess where this one's going! Fiennes relies on nuanced delivery and silent reaction shots (including a self-contained scene devoid of any spoken lines) to get this one across.
The second is the homosexual subtext between Caius and his 'blood enemy' Aufidius (a steely-eyed and amply-bearded Butler), who seems to harbor an unhealthy obsession with Caius that goes beyond mere martinet loathing. The two of them danced the tango of death together on numerous occasions, leaving Aufidius with a major hardon for finishing the job, should they ever meet again "beard to beard". And yeah, when they finally lock proverbial beards after Caius and his men stage a Call of Duty-style assault on a Volscian stronghold, their knife fight really does feel like it's on the verge of another sort of passionate, manly, "beard-to-beard" action, where love and hate are but two strands on the same goat's beard. Lest you think that Fiennes is grasping for pubic straws here, the Bard straight-up wrote lines for Aufidius that compare his reunion with Caius to his own wedding night, so...yeah. Fiennes isn't perving up classic literature for shock value - it's all in there.
But these are mere garnishes. The real appeal here is the magic trick of transplanting an obscure conflict from the annals of early Roman history into the present day. In real life - aka centuries before the Caesars and their wacky carnival of horrors - Volscia was a swampy stretch of land somewhere east of Latinia. In this version, Volscia and Latinia are amalgamations of various two-bit backwater conflict zones, their nationalist warlords, their shabby poverty. There are echoes of the American military machine, and of the enemies it is meant to crush. It's a heady and thrilling conceit, but it runs into problems when it encounters the constraints imposed by the plot and the immutable dialogue in the second half. (Golden rule of producing Shakespeare: you can cut lines out, but you cannot write new ones!!)
Fiennes and co. have done an absolutely astonishing job at deftly dodging around many of those constraints, sure. But the truth is that ancient Romans - especially as viewed through the prism of a playwright living in feudal England hundreds of years ago - were completely different folks motivated by completely different notions that are all but impossible to transpose into modernity. Even with the eloquent use of televised and recorded video as a storytelling medium, Caius's fall from grace and subsequent exile truly stretch the seams of belief-suspension. And even with the incest angle, it's almost impossible to believe that a modern-day Caius would relent simply because his Mum asked nicely - that would require an entirely different societal paradigm where ancestor worship and matters of honor are, like, actual motivating factors in a person's decision-making calculus. This is why what ought to be the most climactic scene in the film is ends up being the most poorly executed. It just doesn't work. It can't possibly work, unless you take away the machine guns and replace them with gladius swords (xiphos swords, actually, if you want nerd out on the history).
It's too bad, because this is great entry-level Shakespeare. The bloody, explosive action ought to help lure the young'ns to the family couch. It certainly worked for me when I was a kid and stumbled upon Julie Taymor's Titus at the tender age of thirteen - grisly, phantasmagoric, sexy, classy...and a master class on how to do anachronistic Shakespeare right. I wolfed down all of the Bard's plays after that, patiently decoding the language, lest I miss an epic diss or a sexy innuendo. It took two hours to accomplish something no amount of public schooling ever could, especially since at the time their idea of 'hip' Shakespeare was showing Luhrmann's groan-inducing R&J adaptation in class.
Ah, kids, if you only knew how much depraved sex and violence awaits you at the local library...