Anger's My Meat
Aug. 16th, 2012 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustSo I finished watching Coriolanus, which is...really great, but also very odd. I don't think I've ever noticed before how much the Roman plays are about Shakespeare trying to reconcile his cultural reverence for Rome with his personal belief that democracy is a weird, scary, impractical system. So all that contempt which Coriolanus has for "the mob", which rings so oddly to us these days? I get the clear feeling we're actually supposed to be rooting for him, or at least be sitting there going: "Well, yeah...I mean, if you have to be accountable to the common cry of curs, how the hell are you gonna get anything done? That's what we have the divine right of kings for, man!"
Not that I think Fiennes is even vaguely concentrating on that part of it...he's coming at the play as a character study of a man completely damaged by his mother's expectations and the Balkanized, war-on-war-on-war history of his country. There's no way that he believes Coriolanus should be given power, since he's completely unequipped to do anything except be a human weapon; the very fact that he goes back to Tullus Aufidius at the end and asks him for more orders would seem to confirm that. He knows it's probably going to kill him, says as much to Volumnia when he acquiesces to her pleas for peace, but he's literally incapable of not being "absolute". He can't think of anything else to do except choose the where and when (and who) of his own inevitable demise.
At any rate: Wonderful movie. Vanessa Redgrave, in particular, blows the goddamn roof off--but hell, even Gerard Butler comes up to snuff. I'd love to see whatever Fiennes does next as a director, if anything; he was perfect for this, but I'll be interested to see if he can handle a film that doesn't revolve around his own performance, the spectrum of emotion he knows himself most capable of.
I've gradually added another 1,000 words to "Scarlet Town", and am now stuck into another exposition-heavy section. Very much like the plot-twists that've suddenly come up from behind, though. Is it possible I might be moving towards the end?
Not that I think Fiennes is even vaguely concentrating on that part of it...he's coming at the play as a character study of a man completely damaged by his mother's expectations and the Balkanized, war-on-war-on-war history of his country. There's no way that he believes Coriolanus should be given power, since he's completely unequipped to do anything except be a human weapon; the very fact that he goes back to Tullus Aufidius at the end and asks him for more orders would seem to confirm that. He knows it's probably going to kill him, says as much to Volumnia when he acquiesces to her pleas for peace, but he's literally incapable of not being "absolute". He can't think of anything else to do except choose the where and when (and who) of his own inevitable demise.
At any rate: Wonderful movie. Vanessa Redgrave, in particular, blows the goddamn roof off--but hell, even Gerard Butler comes up to snuff. I'd love to see whatever Fiennes does next as a director, if anything; he was perfect for this, but I'll be interested to see if he can handle a film that doesn't revolve around his own performance, the spectrum of emotion he knows himself most capable of.
I've gradually added another 1,000 words to "Scarlet Town", and am now stuck into another exposition-heavy section. Very much like the plot-twists that've suddenly come up from behind, though. Is it possible I might be moving towards the end?
