Coriolanus

The overwhelming sense from this film is of good timing: it’s been a little while since the last fashionable Shakespeare adaptation, Ralph Fiennes is a bigger star than ever thanks to his visibility in the Potter franchise, and with the last year’s news dominated by riots and uprisings against dictators, the decision to modernise the story must have seemed incredibly fortunate and certainly comes over as remarkably relevant.

On the other hand, it ends up being the very modernisation that holds back this film from being a truly outstanding adaptation and renders it rather dull and, in all honesty, student-y.

Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare’s very best, despite some excellent moments. The original legend of a good soldier who is a poor politician ending up first exiled for his belief that eagles should certainly be beyond the reach of crows, only to return as a threat and then to end up in the worst position of all because he didn’t have the courage of his conviction and relented only really has an hour or so’s good story, with the rest fleshed out (expertly) by the relationship between Coriolanus as his closest friends, his family and his rival Aufidius.

Fittingly for a Shakespeare adaptation, the setting seems to sit somewhere between contemporary Britain and Rome, with filming in Belgrade giving the scenes of bitter war a grim authenticity. The best and most memorable scenes of the film are confrontations between armies turned into cells of soldiers infiltrating enemy territory and having grim, brutal clashes.

The true strength of this version is its powerful performances, though. Fiennes starts a little falteringly, but is excellent at showing a powerful man becoming vulnerable. I’m not sure I can imagine a better Volumnia than Vanessa Redgrave, who superbly balances ruthlessness, softness and slightly alarming madness. Gerard Butler’s Aufidius deals very well with a difficult part (both a great authority and a bit of a weird fanboy when Coriolanus shows up), and for all its silliness 300 has given him an onscreen gravitas that will benefit him for the rest of his career. James Nesbitt’s politician is perfectly pitched between likeable and loathsome, too, and Brian Cox is deeply reliable in a mature, understated Shakespearean performance.

But as I said, it’s the modernisation that makes the production really falter. On one side, the scenes with Coriolanus coming into contact with the common people fall horribly flat, and the scene with him getting opinions from the marketplace only for them to be quickly turned jumps about loosely and doesn’t work. It was a mistake getting real-life newsreader Jon Snow, for it will badly date the piece and to be honest makes it look like a BBC drama, as he seems to pop up all the time in the likes of Doctor Who. Tamora and Cassius are oddly-cast, and I was never sure whether they were supposed to represent the common people, rabble-rousing outsiders or vaguely meant to make it seem like the setting was actually Rome despite not having Italian accents. Either way, both were too exaggerated for the parts.

But more than that, the problem was that modernisation saps the scale. It’s alright for Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, where there are extravagant parties and huge churches, but here all the pomp of the Roman senate becomes men in suits in a conference hall, armies clashing become five guys in a tank on a desolate road and historic confrontations become TV talk show appearances. I’d much rather see a lavish, high-budget version with legions and togas and gold everywhere, and the change is really one thought of by hundreds of Fringe students before now. Some less grainy cameras for the external shots would have been nice, too, for a 2011 film with big-name stars.

On a side note, this is the last time I will be going to a cinema to see something arty. Popcorn has simply ruined the experience for me. Some morons a row in front of us had big bags of popcorn and couldn’t eat with their mouths closed. In a largely quiet, intense film like this it was absolute torture and I wished I could be at home watching on my projector. Selfish, idiotic people. I don’t understand the association of popcorn with the cinema, I really don’t. I’d like to say it didn’t affect my impressions of the film, but it certainly ruined the experience. I’m paying for a monthly subscription to the cinema anyway, so it’s not like they get less money if I pirate (though one ‘ticket sale’ less will be recorded), and I just hate popcorn that much. From now on, only loud films with things blowing up or people screaming all the time for me. I never again want to be stuck for two hours with selfish idiots going CRUNCH CHOMP GLMMPH CLUMP GULP in a darkened room.

War Horse

It’s a perfect marriage, really – Spielberg, perfectly poised for a comeback on the back of a film from JJ Abrams that was basically a tribute to him, adapts book and West End play War Horse for the screen, minus big puppets but plus real horses and gorgeous scenery. The subject matter of warfare recalls his superb Schindler’s List and memorable Saving Private Ryan, while the unabashedly sentimental story of a horse surviving against all odds nods back to his work for children.

I found this an enjoyable film, and with some real beauty, but not one I’d watch again any time soon, and one that could have been rather more affecting without some of its sillier moments. The plot is that a drunken old farmer risks everything buying a beautiful thoroughbred horse, mostly as a snub to his landlord. His son, who had seen the horse before and become rather taken with it, takes responsibility for training it up and it surprises everyone by adapting to being used as a workhorse. The farmer’s luck remains dismal, though, and a storm ruins the crops, so much to the son’s distress, the father sells the horse – WWI is breaking out and the cavalry need horses. So Joey the Horse goes off to war. On horseback, his new rider faces death and has a very fanciful vision of the horse living through the rest of the war and changing hands several times before finding a happy ending. Well, that’s not actually what happens, but it seems to me the most rational explanation for what actually unfolds: Joey is taken by the Germans, but lost again when two deserters are shot, then spends a while in a fairytale jam-making mill with a sassy little French girl. He is taken again by the Germans, though, and made to pull heavy artillery, which will kill even workhorses in a matter of weeks. However, he survives like this well over three years, at which point he gets free of the Germans as they retreat – presumably to the Hindenburg Line – faces down a tank that for whatever reason is driven by men who think chasing horses is a good plan, runs across No-Man’s land in a tangle of barbed wire, and lays there until he can be rescued, touchingly by soldiers from each side working together. And then the real unlikely coincidences begin.

It’s very mawkish and unlikely, but frankly, if you come to the film expecting anything different, I’d consider you a little uninformed. It’s after all about a horse surviving not just a few battles in the Great War, but its entirety, on both sides. If you simply accept that it’s a sweet fairy story set in the most dismal of worlds, you can enjoy this story, even if like me it’s your area of particular interest and study. And the fanciful character of the filmmaking only enhances it. No, a village in Devon shouldn’t be so often beautiful rolling hills and glorious skies and streets that are very obviously actually in the Cotswolds, but that’s all part of a romantic image of Britain at the time that is rather nice – and makes me feel lucky that my early childhood was in a picturesque part of the countryside. No, it doesn’t make a terrible amount of sense that three years’ crippling labour are glossed over, but it allows for the big resolution of the Armistice and what comes after. It doesn’t matter that the operations on the Somme in 1918 (which lest we forget was the battleground after years of hard struggle – the iconic Battle of the Somme was in 1916, the Germans then fell back to the Hindenburg Line, pushed the Allies back again and then finally retreated again and were overrun in 1918 with the Hundred Days Offensive) largely seem to involve running across a small bit of No-Man’s land and occupying empty but booby-trapped trenches. This isn’t a film to go to for great believability or accuracy – it’s simply a nice story about a horse in a sad time in human history.

For that reason, I consider it a decent film, but not one that I felt was a great weepy or worth multiple viewings. Nor do I feel any great need to see the play, which I always felt I should have gone to before now. Better stories have been told about WWI, most of them true. On the other hand, while it’s WWII films Spielberg is known for, especially ones that reflect upon The Holocaust, it is WWI that moves me the most, and this story is a fascinating addition to its mythos.

The Artist

I wasn’t entirely sure about The Artist based on the trailer, though a small part of that was not liking the way they had chopped up ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, by far my favourite bit of big band swing (which in the film itself was replaced by a very similar original track we can charitably call an homage). It seemed like it would be a tribute to 1920s silent movies, I thought it looked entertaining but perhaps overly simplistic and not as clever as it thought it was.

to 1920s silent movies, I thought it looked entertaining but perhaps overly simplistic and not as clever as it thought it was.

Well, it indeed wasn’t quite as smart or innovative as it wanted to be, and suffered from a severe lack of subtlety in places, but it was nonetheless a very enjoyable watch and a loving tribute to a bygone era.

George Valentin is one of the great stars of the silent era. One day, a pretty young fan called Peppy Miller is pictured kissing him on the cheek, which propels her to fame in her own right. However, the silent era is ending and the talkies are taking over. While Valentin and Peppy begin a mostly chaste liaison that others – including Valentin’s estranged wife – may misinterpret, Valentin resists the transition into pictures with sound and gets left behind. The girl who rose up from nowhere to become Hollywood Royalty, though, was perfectly positioned for it, and becomes its new icon. In the end, it is Valentin who has nothing, but just maybe Peppy’s old loyalties will be able to save him.

The obvious comparison is to Rudolph Valentino, but the character is more an amalgam of John Gilbert, who butted heads with his studio head, whose career flopped when talkies arrived, who turned to booze and who an old-flame-turned-big-star attempted to rescue – and Douglas Fairbanks, who played the sort of characters Valentin plays here, and who lavished much of his personal wealth on a last silent film even when talkies had already taken over. There are elements of Mary Pickford as well as Garbo in Peppy, too, and the prominent influence on the film’s overall style is arguably their United Artists co-founder DW Griffiths (with Niblo and Sennett around the edges, of course). The end comes with a fanciful nod to Fred and Ginger.

It’s not really an original or imaginative plot, one that would no doubt occur to most with any interest in silent film, or possibly anyone who has ever seen the beginning of Mack & Mabel. Indeed, I much preferred the way Hugo treated the films of the decade before these, and much was too heavy-handed: a dreadful dream sequence reflecting Valentin’s anxiety about talkies, for example, or the scene where his estranged wife exclaims in titles ‘We need to talk! Why won’t you talk?’ just when his stubbornness about not transitioning to the talkies is dragging down his career. On the other hand, the devotion to a full film in black and white and glorious 4:3 with – barring the very end – only music and a single song is not only fun to watch and a fond homage, but really makes the film memorable in concept. The casting was also great, with one or two familiar, distinctive faces (John Goodman and James Cromwell) complimenting the two main actors’ perfect looks, the leading lady only vaguely familiar from A Knight’s Tale and the director’s previous works with them unfamiliar to me.

Possibly a film those who have seen very little silent cinema will love more than those more familiar with the era, as they will find it more novel and more original in story times, it is nonetheless a very enjoyable, straightforward love story with a satisfying ending, engaging characters and a superb conceptual hook. Oh, and I also enjoyed the fact that its quiet soundtrack prevented the usual loud munching of popcorn – it would have been too distractingly loud, so people refrained.