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Ralph Fiennes leads the charge in ‘Coriolanus’

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February 12, 2012|By Christopher Wallenberg

Ralph Fiennes as Caius Martius and Gerard Butler as Tullus Aufidius in "Coriolanus." (Larry D. Horricks/Weinstein…)

NEW YORK - “Enough!’’ screamed the cover of the New York Post, referring to the Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. The headline and accompanying editorial, with the admonition that the protesters are “a public nuisance’’ whose “time is up,’’ caught Ralph Fiennes’s eye one early November morning during a brief stopover in Manhattan. He seized on the article’s resonance with the title character in “Coriolanus,’’ the big-screen contemporary adaptation of the Shakespeare play in which Fiennes both stars and makes his directorial debut. The film opens in the Boston area on Friday.

“The right-wing media have taken quite a reactionary attitude to the protests, saying that the Occupy movement is a blight on the city. And I’m sure that’s how Coriolanus would feel, too. . . . He has no time for the civilian world. People protest, and they’re hungry. But he can’t understand their point of view. He thinks their words are disloyal. He’s been on the front lines and been prepared to die many times,’’ said Fiennes, 49, speaking in a relaxed, efficient manner despite a harried schedule. He had just wrapped a three-month run playing Prospero in “The Tempest’’ in London and then was jetting off to shoot two films in a row: director Mike Newell’s new adaptation of Dickens’s “Great Expectations’’ and director Sam Mendes’s new Bond film, “Skyfall.’’

A vaunted, battle-scarred general, Coriolanus (né Caius Martius) oozes valor and forthrightness. But he is also a man of bullheaded pride with little sympathy, indeed condescension, for the suffering of the Roman people, who are in the midst of a food shortage and have had their civil liberties suspended.

The play presents the audience with a conundrum - a brutish protagonist with whom they may be deeply reluctant to empathize, but whose courage and fierce desire to stick to his principles they may respect.

“Coriolanus, for all his arrogance, is trying to hold to an absolute sense of what is right, an absolute sense of national loyalty and personal military integrity. He has a sort of military samurai ideal about life,’’ said Fiennes. “What I like about the piece is that the audience is challenged about where to put its allegiance and its sympathy. I think it’s a real puzzle, and we’re faced with it every day in the world around us.’’