Hacker Cinema
Coriolanus
2011 · Film · 123 min
Directed by Ralph Fiennes
Caius Martius, aka Coriolanus, is an arrogant and fearsome general who has built a career on protecting Rome from its enemies. Pushed by his ambitious mother to seek the position of consul, Coriolanus is at odds with the masses and unpopular with certain colleagues. When a riot results in his expulsion from Rome, Coriolanus seeks out his sworn enemy, Tullus Aufidius. Together, the pair vow to destroy the great city.
1 positive1 neutralfrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
Absolutely you should watch it. Your comparison is apt; you're missing most of it if you're just reading the script. The sights and sounds of a good performance make it much easier to follow.
Reading the script is an advanced skill. I think we do a real disservice throwing unedited scripts at students.
As for what to watch, there are many great film versions. Branagh's Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing were my gateway. There is a stunning Titus by Julie Taymor, especially if you like horror -- it's an obscure play but Taymor makes a spectacle of it. There have been several very good Macbeth adaptations recently; I need to catch Denzel Washington's because I've heard it's great. There was also a very good Coriolanus recently (another obscure play given a very modern and relevant performance).
I would watch a film, and if you love it, read the play to find out how it works.
Well, the plots are really bad, even by Shakespeare's standards. Cymbelline is a mess of mistaken identities and increasingly arbitrary subplots that require a literal deus ex machina to resolve: Jupiter himself shows up and just tells everybody how to end the play. Pericles started life as a collection of unrelated short stories, crammed together haphazardly. The Winter's Tale has a terrible main character, so the plot just goes completely elsewhere for 17 years, followed by a completely unmotivated and really bizarre quickie "redemption". In each case you leave the theater having no idea how to feel about anything. They weren't funny, but neither have they resolved dramatically. They just kinda stop.
That said... two of the films I mentioned are of plays considered barely better than these. Titus is literally a horror play, but Julie Taymor was the director of the Broadway Lion King, and turned it into achingly beautiful and horribly tragic art. The Coriolanus is less of an artistic achievement, but they resolved the play's terrible pacing problems to make it a thrilling political action movie.
The real reason the plays I listed are rarely performed isn't the plot, but the fact that there isn't anything else great to recommend them. They don't have great poetry or engaging characters. They're just kinda limp.
But who knows? Maybe they just need somebody to find the magic in them. A couple of years ago I had a wild success with a production of Timon of Athens, a kind of reverse Chrismas Carol where the Scrooge starts off as a good, generous man who spends the whole second half of the play complaining about how badly he got screwed over. Then he kills himself. I edited it to keep the pace up, found the dark comedy in it, and people said that they didn't know why it's not performed more often.
So any of these plays could have a great rediscovery at some point and change how people think about them. But we're also very aware that even the best of Shakespeare's plays have deep flaws, both intrinsically and in the way expectations have changed in 400 years. We find that they mean something to us, and even the terrible ones contain something that adds to the work as a whole. I can report what most people think, but the real wins come when somebody takes a fresh look.
I don't think a plain English adaptation is very helpful. His work isn't about the story, but the language. The work is poetry, both literally and figuratively, and a plain English adaptation is like somebody telling you about their favorite song.
Better, I think, is to see a good film adaptation. Shakespeare was never intended to be read, but to be performed. There's a lot in the text that isn't apparent until you've studied it closely, but a good performance will bring it right out in the open.
A few films that I'd suggest to get started with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V_(1989_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing_(1993_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_(1995_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolanus_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_%2B_Juliet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(2000_film)
These are all good, accessible versions of his plays. You don't need to be an expert to understand and enjoy them. (They're very roughly in order of my favorites, if that matters to you.)
I won't guarantee you'll like them. There's really nothing wrong with that. People get snobby about Shakespeare, and they shouldn't. It's OK to say, "Yeah, it's not for me". But under all the snobbery, there really is great text and great performances that people genuinely enjoy. If you're interested in that, these films are the places I'd start.
Coriolanus.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1372686/