At the LFF: "Coriolanus"

Now that Kenneth Branagh looks to have abandoned the Bard for comic books, who will bring Shakespeare kicking and screaming into the multiplexes? Branagh always was a cuddly, approachable crowdpleaser - part Olivier, yes, but also part Noel Edmonds, casting Dickie Briers and Brian Blessed in much the same way Cheggers and Tony Blackburn would always show up on old episodes of Noel's House Party. The star persona of Ralph Fiennes - erstwhile Amon Goeth and Francis Dolarhyde - is, however, a very different construct, which may be why the actor has taken as his directorial debut Coriolanus, Shakespeare's eel-like musing on war, politics and the people. In the lead, Fiennes appears scarified and bald-pated, covered in blood and gore from more or less the word go, both man of war and a thrusting, threatening meathead. To pursue the comparison using a current literary sensation, where Branagh's always been a bit of a Gilderoy Lockhart, Fiennes still unshakably has something of the Voldemort about him.

The action in Fiennes' version, adapted for the screen by Gladiator scribe John Logan, unfolds in and around Rome, though it was shot in Serbia and Montenegro, giving the city a distinctly mitteleuropan feel; inserts apparently sourced from actual Balkan uprisings lend additional dramatic spice. (In a further bold, incongruous touch, our very own Jon Snow is still to be observed reading the nightly news in iambic pentameter, which will doubtless come as a relief, comic or otherwise, to some.) Fiennes' Caius Martius rises to prominence in post-Hurt Locker urban warfare sequences that allow the director-star to run about with an automatic rifle and brawl with Gerard Butler's Aufidius; it's only when he inherits the name Coriolanus - and the social responsibility that comes with it - that he reveals himself as greatly more at home in uniform than he is in a politician's suit. These latter scenes bear the influence of later seasons of The West Wing, as a born leader of men has to be talked into leading, only to then struggle to talk the electorate round, lacking both the emollient words and the general inclination to do so.

I'm about as far from an expert in this field as it's possible to be, but in an age where even Roland Emmerich is making movies about this playwright (Anonymous screens at the LFF next Tuesday), maybe there's no real harm in venturing an opinion: this strikes me as one of Shakespeare's least populist plays, and Fiennes and Logan have preserved an ambivalence about "the rank-scented many" that chimes with the actor's aloof demeanour, while immediately setting this version in conflict with anyone showing up to Screen One with hotdogs and nachos. Yet if the tenor throughout is coolly cerebral, Coriolanus is none the worse for it. Fiennes' relatively sparse, unflashy staging returns us to the text without ever seeming to shrink the screen to a stage: the audience I saw the film with sat in an unusually rapt silence, as we collectively attempted to decipher the language, its nuances and subtleties, beyond the clues and prompts the director and his actors offer us.

Still, there are points where Coriolanus doesn't seem nearly smart enough, and these can mostly be put down to the vagaries of enforced modernisation. It was a stroke of genius that Michael Almereyda should, in his 2000 Hamlet, have had his slacker prince recite the "To Be or Not To Be" speech in the Action section of a Blockbuster Video: here, everything seemed not just plausible, but newly modern and resonant. By contrast, Fiennes needed to know that if you're going to restage a senate debate as a TV show, you're going to need a host - to respect the format - and not just rely on a pair of scheming tribunes (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson) whipping the studio audience into a frenzy. (Was Jeremy Kyle not available?) Similarly, I didn't quite buy Coriolanus's decision to exile himself, turning his back on his plush upper-class existence to hobo his way around Europe with a rucksack on his back. Again, I'm no scholar, but this feels like a play of sudden, almost arbitrary alliances and ruptures, and the filmmakers needed to be just a little more careful about selling us on each one.

Yet patches of it, vivid scenes and runs of scenes, are powerful indeed, lent force and weight by an exceptional cast. If Fiennes' natural tendency towards restraint isn't doing himself or the film any favours - clenched and coiled, this Coriolanus isn't someone any of us can cheer for automatically - it is peculiarly right for the role, and he deserves our respect for transforming the downfall of an individual who might otherwise have resembled Ross Kemp into a complex and mostly compelling spectacle. Brian Cox really does know how to make this text come alive, as the spindoctor-kingmaker Menenius, and there's a thoughtful, noteworthy performance from Butler, who suddenly seems an actor rather than just a brickie who got lucky. Not all the casting comes off - Jessica Chastain and John Kani appear here simply to lend colour of different kinds to a generally sombre palette - but it's revivifying to have the Vanessa Redgrave of old back on screen, her Volumnia tall and imposing, rather than the dotty dears the cinema too often encourages her to play these days, and speaking the text like a mother tongue. Her scenes together with Fiennes are properly chilling; for better and worse, so too is the film.

Coriolanus screens at the Odeon West End tonight at 7.30pm, and again at the Vue West End tomorrow (Mon 17) at 12.30pm, before opening nationwide in January 2012.