See it on the small screen. Great play, good script, decent acting, dreadful camera-work.

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2012)

Coriolanus is arguably Shakespeare's greatest play. I recall seeing it for the first time and being blown away by it. I thought that perhaps the Royal Shakespeare Company had altered it to make it seem more modern, but the words were the original bard's. This film sets the action in the modern world, and it does so successfully. Many of the words explaining events come in the form of televised newscasts, soldiers ride around on tanks and wear camouflage clothing, characters talk to each other on telephones, politicians wear suits, and public debates happen in television studios. All this is fine because the play's themes are so very modern.
Naturally, the film script shortens the wordiness of the play, and naturally this has the effect of heightening the importance of some aspects, while diminishing others. The screenplay puts emphasis on the character of Coriolanus' mother, and the direction and acting suggests that Tullus Aufidius is to some degree attracted sexually to the eponymous hero. One theme oddly neglected, especially given the use of television in the film, is the fickleness of the common people. The later stages of the film never involve the common crowds of Rome again.
The cast is good. The accents are a strange and unexplained mixture (Scottish, Northern Irish, English, as well as some Mediterranean ones) but this is of little consequence given that ancient Rome was probably also a mix, and the disjuncture of modern artefacts and archaic English is far greater.
Now I come to the camera-work. The picture quality is very poor. My eyes tell me that it was not shot on film. There are many scenes deliberately low-quality, made to resemble television broadcasts, but even the scenes with the highest picture quality are a vague haze of visible pixels. When I pay to go to the cinema, I expect decent picture quality, and a large screen shows up every failing. The style of camera-work is that trendy 'reality television'/documentary style which involves wobbling the camera around a lot in supposed simulation of improvisation. This is almost always overdone, and in this case in some scenes the cameraman seems to be having an epileptic fit, and the picture will probably give you less of a headache on a smaller screen (which will also not show you the pixels so clearly).
Another very annoying thing about the camera-work is that someone seems to have made the decision that a shallow depth of field is a good thing. Many of the shots are slightly out of focus, which is annoying (but will show less on the small screen). Worse, in the intense shots of actors faces in close-up, delivering key lines of dialogue, the camera should focus the mind of the audience on the expression of the actor's face and the meaning of the words he speaks. Actors move as they perform, and when the depth of field is this shallow, it becomes a great distraction that one notices that the tips of the actor's eyelashes are sharp, while the roots of them and his pupil are a blur.
I recommend this film, mainly because it showcases a terrific play which deserves to be far better known. I also recommend seeing it on DVD. Given how bad the picture quality is, I suspect that the makers thought that they were shooting for a television release of the film, and that the demands of the big cinema screen were not considered important.