Sometimes the book is better than the movie — even when “the book” is “the script.”



I first spotted news of a Ralph Fiennes / Gerard Butler Coriolanus movie back in October 2009.  Well, the movie came and went in a very limited release late in 2011 (I don’t recall it ever coming through Boston), but it snuck onto DVD within the last couple of weeks and I got a copy for Father’s Day.  Prior to that I’d actually gotten a copy of the shooting script, which I reviewed here.

Here’s my really high level summary of the play, which I admit to having limited knowledge of:  Caius Marcius (played by Ralph Fiennes, who gets the Coriolanus title later in the play) is the super-soldier of the Roman army, doing battle against the Volscians, let by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler).  Although Marcius had received some 27 wounds in more than a dozen battles, he has never been able to defeat Aufidius.  In fact they even battle hand-to-hand at the battle of Corioles, and it ends in a draw.

Well, Marcius’ advisors urge him to make a move into political office, and playing to the whims of the people is not in Marcius’ nature.  This goes badly for him, and it’s not long before his enemies (and the people of Rome) are screaming for his head.  But they’ll accept his banishment.

Marcius (now Coriolanus) does that natural thing, he walks straight into the Volscian camp, makes peace with his sworn enemy, and chooses to march on Rome.

This is where the entirety of the Roman empire has a collective, “What have we done?!” moment and scramble to figure out how to calm the enraged dragon (lots of dragon references in this play).   They send Coriolanus’ wife, mother and child to try and talk some sense into him.  It’s a very weird image, no doubt — this one-man army that has all of Rome quaking, and his mother giving him a guilt trip.  And having it work.

So, how was the movie?

I had some pretty high expectations after reading the script, and I was disappointed in the beginning.  The direction is, well, it’s not good.  As I live-tweeted my experience, this was echoed back at me from all angles – don’t like the direction.  The battle scenes in particular cut all over the place, and scenes from the script that I thought were going to be these amazing moments just come and go like nothing.  The whole battle at Corioles is supposed to be Caius Marcius single-handedly routing the Volscians.  I expected to see Fiennes’ character elevated into some sort of superhuman killing machine.  What I saw instead was just a battle scene that could have been any other battle scene, it just happened to have Fiennes in the lead.

After the battle there’s another scene that the script pays careful attention to, where Coriolanus’ mother is binding his wounds after battle, and his wife walks in on them.  The way it’s written there’s supposed to be this awkward moment where both Coriolanus and his mother look at the wife like she’s the outsider, like this bond between mother and son is the most natural thing in the world.  In the actual movie, however, this scene just comes and goes so quickly you wonder why it was even left in.

What I did like about the movie is when it shifted over into the political maneuvering.  Coriolanus is quickly taken out of his element and turned into a pawn where two sides are clearly shoving him around the board for their own gain.  He begrudgingly wins the support of the people (something he’s been told is required), but the second he leaves, his political enemies swoop in and turn the crowd right back in the other direction.

When people want to cite examples of how to turn a crowd through oratory they often go to Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar. But Coriolanus has plenty such moments.  “He should have showed us his battle scars!” calls out one of the citizens.  This is something that was hyped up by his handlers — the people want to see him take off his shirt and show the scars he got defending his country, something that Coriolanus refuses to do.  “I’m pretty sure he did show them, didn’t he?” responds one of his political enemies, knowing full well the answer.  “No!  No, he did not!  He didn’t!!” the crowd roars back, now enraged.

A moment here for Brian Cox, who plays Coriolanus’ trusted advisor Menenius.  His acting is superb in this crucial supporting role.  Early on he is an excitable political flunky, thrilled at the idea that his man has received 2 more wounds in battle.  “He had 25,” says Coriolanus’ mother.  “Now he has 27!” Menenius replies joyfully.  Later, when the crowd has turned, Menenius must then come to the negotiating table with their political enemies and bargain for his man’s very life, pleading “What must he do?” and then having the difficult job of trying to get Coriolanus to do it.

It is Menenius who is sent to beg Coriolanus not to attack Rome, and to suffer the results when it does not go well.  This scene was done especially well I thought, as Menenius goes from “Screw all you people, you’re the ones who banished him, you deal with it” to “Ok, I’m the only one he’ll listen to, I will go talk to him” to Coriolanus’ single word dismissal.

I don’t know how to wrap this up, having never seen a different production of this play to compare against.  I’m told that the ending is changed, but I couldn’t tell you how.  I can tell you that reading the script made me anticipate certain scenes, and that those scenes did not deliver, which is a shame.  But there were plenty of moments in the movie that I enjoyed that I did not expect – mostly the individual character evolution, and all the politics.

Here’s how I think I’ll sum it up.  This summer I’ll be going to see Coriolanus on Boston Common with my wife and some friends.  As is custom I’ll no doubt be asked what the play is about, and be tasked with summarizing the character and plot and pointing out the important bits.  I will not point out Coriolanus’ mother (much), nor will I point out the oddly homo-erotic relationship with Aufidius.  I will point to Coriolanus’ interactions with the crowd – why exactly he does not want to do what is asked of him, why it works the first time, how his enemies twist his words, and how it does not end well.  I think that might have been the most interesting part of the play for me.

So, I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting mobile Shakespeare apps. Even more so since I switched from Apple to Android, because my kids’ Kindle Fires run Android and if I can find Shakespeare apps for those, then, well, score.

Brand new on the scene is MicroShakespeare, where you get an animated talking Shakespeare character who laughs and dances when you touch him, and swings his arms dramatically when speaking his quotes.  Cute.

The app itself contains :

• touch Shakespeare to have him recite a quote.  That’s probably the main purpose and the thing everybody would use this for.  I haven’t yet explored whether he’s only got the most common quotes that we all already know, or if the database is bigger than average
• a “test your knowledge” game.  More on this in a bit.
• a mini-biography of Shakespeare (pointless for this crowd, really) which is just a page of text.
• a “magic 8 ball” feature where you’re supposed to ask a question and then shake your phone, and have Shakespear give you an answer. Amusing, I suppose, if you like such things.

It’s quote clear that they have an engine for generating these things, and there’s a whole line of “Micro-” famous people that you can get.  I assume that there’s just a little database they’re filling up with trivia questions and famous quotes.  Then they get a designer to whip up an animated version of the famous person, and presto, new app!

Let’s get back to the game, which I find the most interesting part. You’re asked 10 multiple choice questions and then given your score out of 10. I did keep getting new questions, so that’s good. That means I can play until I’ve seen all the questions.  Unfortunately, if you get one wrong all it does is say you got it wrong – there’s no spot where it tells you the right answer, and most importantly why that one is the right answer.

My problem is that I think it’s getting some of the answers wrong.  Maybe I’m having a senior moment, but could somebody please tell me whether I’m understanding the following questions correctly?

1. A question asks how many of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts exist, and it tells me that the answer of “none” is incorrect.  Is there a way to interpret that question so that the answer is more than zero?
2. A question asks when all of Shakespeare’s plays were performed, and the answer of “daytime” is considered the correct answer. But didn’t Blackfriar’s and its candles allow for performances at any time?
3. A question asks which play contains the line “A horse, my kingdom for a horse.”  Tells me that Richard III is not the right answer.

For the asking price of $1.50 it’s a cute thing for Shakespeare fans to have.  I’ll probably see if I can contact the developer to ask about the questions, once one of you good folks tells me that I’m not losing my mind.

Then again, given that I learned of this app just this week within days of its launch (because someone named “RK” posted a comment on an old Android post of mine), I’m going to assume that the guys that wrote it are trying to get the word out and may actually see this post.  If so, hello developers!  The game’s only been out for a few days and even though the market says it’s been downloaded less than a few dozen times, it’s already got multiple 5 star (and only 5 star) reviews.  That makes it pretty obvious that you are writing your own reviews (or having friends do it).  My favorite is how all 5 reviews were all posted from a Samsun Galaxy devise.  That’s one heck of a coincidence!  You may want to tone it down a bit and try to generate some real positive reviews from real users.  Just a suggestion. 🙂

Is there anyone out there who reads a blog like this one and who hasn’t seen Shakespeare in Love? Well I know you haven’t seen it in shiny new high definition Blu-ray, because it just came out this week :).

In case you haven’t, let me recap a bit.  Joseph Fiennes (yes, Coriolanus’ brother) plays a Shakespeare we never really think about — a struggling playwright with a serious case of writer’s block.  Worse, all he’s doing is banging out whatever he can sell for some quick coin.  He has no grand plan, he’s just scraping out a living in the shadow of men like Christopher Marlowe.  The play he’s working on right now?  “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” which of course becomes Romeo and Juliet.

Enter Viola, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who for a change is madly passionately in love with Shakespeare’s work rather than Marlowe’s.  So much so, in fact, that she dresses up like a man for a chance to play a role on his stage.  See what they did there?  A movie about Shakespeare that has a girl dressing like a boy?  A girl named Viola? You have to love it already. 😉

Shakespeare develops a strong bond with this character of hers (who goes by Thomas Kent), and it’s only a matter of time before Shakespeare meets and falls in love with Viola as well (breaking from the Orsino parallel), putting her in that odd…well…Viola-like state of being in love with the man she works for, who happens to think that she’s a boy.

How will it all end?  It’s a mystery! 🙂

The movie is just beautiful on all fronts.  The costumes are beautiful, the scenary is beautiful (both even more so in high def like this). The script is beautiful (if the name Tom Stoppard doesn’t mean anything to you, it should!), the pacing is beautiful. There’s an amazing sequence where Shakespeare and Viola are going over lines in bed together, intermixed with Viola as Thomas Kent on stage delivering the lines in public.  Later, when the play begins, we keep cutting back to several interest parties who are racing to put a stop to it.  What will happen? Will the show go on? You’ll find yourself gasping every time the Globe audience gasps.

Of course, like all these movies I have my standard complaint – I don’t care about the not-Shakespeare parts.  There’s a whole story about how Viola has been betrothed to a random nobleman weasel whose name I don’t even remember, and other than as an obstacle I just don’t care anything about him. When Shakespeare’s not on screen and there’s nobody doing Shakespeare lines?  I might as well hit fast forward for how much I’m paying attention.

There’s some special features on the disc, although I’m unsure if they are new for Blu-ray or were on the original DVD release.  I watched “deleted scenes” (not a blooper reel, just scenes that did not make it in) and listened to the audio commentary track from “the whole gang”.  I’m not used to doing that, that was weird.  I kept thinking “Stop stepping on the lines!” 🙂

In the end, though, I was serious when I said I expect that most of my audience has seen this movie.  The question is whether you want to add the Blu-ray edition to your collection. Right now Amazon looks like they have it for about eight bucks, so why wouldn’t you?

Score one for my mom, who has apparently been paying attention when I talk.  A few weeks ago she handed me Arliss Ryan’s The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare
, which she’d picked up at a yard sale for fifty cents.  “I saw Shakespeare and thought of you,” she told me.  I enjoy that this is the response to Shakespeare people in my life have, “Oh Duane would like this.”

I thank her for the gift, and based on the cover art I assume that it is a young adult piece of fiction that I can hand over to my daughters.  Nevertheless I decide to read it.  It does not go past me that a) I blogged about this as a new arrival in February of this year, and b) it’s still got it’s $15.00 price tag on it from Borders, and my mom found it for 50 cents.  So I do not have high hopes for a book that tumbled so quickly out of sight.

I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised.  First of all it
is not young adult.  It does not take long at all for Mistress Hathaway to meet young Master Shakespeare, and all sorts of things are being unbuttoned and unlaced very quickly.  My kids aren’t seeing this one anytime soon.  So forget the young adult thing, this is more of I guess what you’d call a “historical romance.”  (Although I am left wondering, since the book basically starts with them getting married when Anne was what, 28? Why is there a young teenage girl on the cover?)
Once I realized what I was reading, everything fell into place.  This is to be your classic “behind every great man is a woman” story.  Will Shakespeare, forced into a loveless marriage and unhappy with his life in Stratford, runs away to London to make a name for himself.  What does Anne Shakespeare do?  Why, follows him of course.  Leaving her children to the care of the Shakespeares, forever loyal Anne (who continually repeats her mantra that she married for life) packs some belongings, hitches up her skirt and heads off to London as well.

What happens next?  Why, she writes Shakespeare’s plays, of course. 🙂  I’m only half kidding.  Using the story that she is Shakespeare’s sister, not his wife (thus allowing both of them many freedoms a married couple would not have been allowed), she quickly gets a job copying scripts for him, which turns into a job (unknown to anyone else) helping him edit and, soon, write the plays.  How many?  I won’t spoil it.  In this book’s world, her contribution is … not small.

I am very pleased with the amount of detail that’s gone into the biographical portions.  All of the details of Shakespeare’s life that I would expect are accounted for – Greene’s Groatsworth, the back story behind the sonnets, Marlowe’s bar fight, the night time raid on the Globe, Hamnet’s death, etc… The author appears to have done some research.

The downside, however, is in the treatment of the plays. It looks pretty obvious to me that the author took her own opinion of the plays, and pasted that over her storyline.  Falstaff and Hamlet are their greatest creations (makes you wonder what role Bloom played in the research, doesn’t it?), while King Lear gets nary a mention, other than to say that it’s the saddest of the lot, and is part of a comedy sequence involving Shakespeare trying to figure out how to make it rain in his theatre.  Most of the later plays are dismissed as “not our best work.”  Coriolanus is singled out with “no one will be quoting that one in twenty years.”  And it is a fairly obvious modern woman who heaps her scorn upon Two Gentlemen of Verona, and not a historically accurate Anne Hathaway.  The author may hate that one, but the words she put into Anne’s mouth seemed pretty out of place for anybody that pays attention to more plays than just “the big ones.”

Oh, and the Dark Lady of the sonnets gets completely brushed off, which to me screamed simply that the author didn’t want to take a stand on that one (or, did not have the research to do so).  From her perspective, she knows that her husband has women on the side, so if he writes about one in particular in his sonnets, so what is it to her?  The only obvious thing here is that the sonnets are supposedly autobiographical. Take that how you please.

Another disappointing bit is that she seems to just plain get bored detailing how the plays came to be.  They start out strong, and there’s good back story for why the Henry plays were written, and in that order.  But it’s not long before the plot chugs along as quickly as “Oh, the new Scottish king likes witches, does he?  Here, let’s bang out Macbeth” or “I’m feeling a bit jealous today, oh look there’s a new Italian story on the market nobody’s done yet let me just run home and whip up Othello.”  But even then, later in the book the two Shakespeares will bemoan that they’ll only be remembered for “the great ones like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello.”  Other than with Hamlet and Falstaff (and maybe a little Romeo and Juliet), there is very little time spent on “Wow, we wrote a masterpiece that will be spoken of for centuries to come.”  It’s all just “Shakespeare became a successful playwright by giving the audience what they wanted.”

It is an entertaining book, don’t get me wrong. I want my wife to read it. I think it’s written for a very specific audience.  Clearly a romance novel.  Anne, the ever loyal wife stuck in a loveless marriage, tries everything to make it work.  But darn it she’s still a woman, she still has needs, and she finds ways to fill those needs.

This is an good book not precisely for a Shakespeare fan, but for someone close to a Shakespeare fan.  You want your family and your friends to get the details of Shakespeare’s life? To share a little bit of your passion for the subject with them, without boring them to tears or talking over their heads?  That’s where a book like this comes in.  The details are basically right. I would much rather have somebody start with this book and explain to them where the story is not historically accurate, than for them to fall victim to any number of Authorship theories and have to start them over from scratch. This book knows that it is fiction.

Pick it up
and give it to a loved one, like my mom did, and like I’m going to do.