Coriolanus

This is a modern day version of Shakespeare's play that retains the classical language of the original production. The play is based on the life of the Roman General Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, the legend of whom is still contested by some historians. Shakespeare wrote the play in the early 1600s but here it has been appropriated to the modern combat zone of Rome. Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes) leads a group of fellow soldiers on a strike mission, taking down their adversaries of the state. Yet in a standoff he fails to defeat his main enemy Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler). Returning from combat and Coriolanus is praised as a hero. Yet he upsets the public when they believe that he is mocking them and is sent into exile, away from his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), his wife Virgilia (Jessica Chastain) and his son.
I appreciated this modern version of Coriolanus, directed by its star Ralph Fiennes, more as a concept or theory of appropriation than as a pure cinematic experience. This film asks us about timelessness and authorship but not in ways that it would ever intend. Choosing to set the film in modern times but keeping the Early Modern English dialogue is problematic. Preserving the colourful language means that the film is true to the play and its timeless themes but also potentially distancing for modern audiences too. There are some wonderful lines here like: "There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger." Yet if you are unfamiliar with this style of dialogue it will challenge how much you can invest in the story and characters. In being familiar with some Shakespearean plot devices, narratives and characters I was able to access the film but only in a broad overview of the narrative when there are probably much more subtle dimension to the side characters that one could miss. At least anyone familiar with 'King Lear' (1603) though will recognise elements like the exile of a leader, the failure to listen to the public because of one's hubris and the tragic ending. By remaining so faithful to the play Fiennes the director, not the actor, fails to transcend the story towards the cinematic medium. There's an early battle scene that is excitingly staged, without restoring too thickly to blood. It looks like it could be any modern combat zone and realises the timelessness of the play to current issues of dictatorships, which is one of the reasons Fiennes was interested in the piece. Interestingly, the play was banned in Germany following the Second World War, because it was linked too closely with fascism.
Yet despite its universal themes there are still moments that don't bode well to the modern period because of the emphasis on retaining the theatrical design. After the opening battle, the knife fight between the two soldiers as everyone stands around watching seems particularly unlikely. Similarly, as much as I'd like to see some people from TV banished, a call to exile from an audience watching Coriolanus in an interview doesn't fit either or at least seems too compressed. What remains are some incredibly long stretches of dialogue, which are testing, no matter how much conviction is provided by the cast. When Fiennes resorts to more cinematic techniques, like tight close up shots of the faces of the actors, including an outstanding Redgrave, he reveals and amplifies the anger in these character and we feel the impact of the story. It is far more engaging than just having the actors surrounded by clusters of bodies, like in a play. Disappointingly, the supporting cast doesn't match the leads because the likes of Jessica Chastain are underused and don't have enough to do. But if another version of King Lear were made, she would be a perfect Cordelia because her face is an emotive one of great innocence. Although you can appreciate the timelessness of the original plays themes and its overall essence here, I think those who are particularly familiar with the source material and general Shakespearean tropes will draw the most from the film's narrative and the performances.

Spider

From the opening frames of the credits, the church hymn, the Rorschach prints and the measured and precise pacing of them, we are entering a world of a severely disengaged man, who has had the spectre of schizophrenia as his constant companion, both in his waking and sleeping hours. The mumblings and rememberances of Dennis Clegg (Ralph Fiennes)combine to make for a journey down Memory Lane that is unlike any that rational, thinking people would care to take, let alone inhabit and from which there is very little chance of escape.
Fiennes spends the length of the film attempting to piece together bits and pieces of times past in his childhood, that may or may not have happened. The prize in this herculanean effort is not so much to discover the unseemly goings on of his father, but rather seeking a discourse into the inner workings of Clegg's mind and what it potentially holds and abandons at will.
Dennis Clegg has been released into the care of a matron (Lynn Regrave) in a halfway house in a decaying, dying section of London, that has become the home, heart and soul for others of his ilk; the mentally disabled, discharged from the asylum, but not quite ready for habitation in the outside world at large. His lodgings represent the underbelly of a netherworld that caters to no one and where rehabilitation is a foreign word,absent from the vocabulary of those in charge.
Redgrave plays Mrs. Wilkinson, the spawn of Nurse Ratchet, with a demeanor as cold as the grave and as uncaring as any you are likely to see. Hers is a job, nothing more, nothing less; an automaton in the flesh. John Neville (teamed again with Fiennes. He was in "Sunshine.") as Terrance,another resident of the house, has etched a character who sums up the medicated and serene patient seen as a non-threat to the establishment, but who attempts to warn Clegg of the "queenly" attitudes of Wilkinson and the powers she holds. This British character actor's small part in this film is a gem deserving of recognition.
Every movement that Clegg makes is guaranteed to bear witness to a recollection and to focus on events as perceived in his ever crumbling mind. Once his journey into neverland begins, we are brought along ever so slowly so that we capture these moments precisely and without seeing error. We learn that his mother, as played by Miranda Richardson, had nicknamed him "Spider" and it is through his newly gained name that his mannerisms take on the skin of the animal. Each newly remembered facet of his world is honed on the impressions of a spider web -- the string, broken glass, the jigsaw puzzle, the string game he plays at the kitchen table -- spiraling and spinning the child and the man into its deadly web and further from reality as we know it.
Richardson portrays three multi-faceted characters in this film, three spirits, and with each one she sheds a skin and grows another, entirely different in bearing and manner. It is a tour de force performance. Gabriel Bryne as Bill Clegg is dark and daunting, shown as a family man bored and tired with the mundance existance that is his life. Or is he?
The performance of Bradley Hall as the young Spider is eerie and precisely on the money. You can feel a kindred spirit between his child Spider and the adult that he is to become in Ralph Fiennes.
The best has been saved for last and that honour belongs to Ralph Fiennes. His Spider is haunted and haunting, gritty and realistic. This crumbling vestige of a man has been finely honed and not once did I think that I was watching a "performance" but rather as true a representation of a schizophrenic as one is able to command. It is not a glamour role or a safe role, not a trace of "pretty boy" about it and thank god, none attempting to project itself from the proceedings! Fiennes, who is known for the research he puts into his roles, has scored all aces with this one.
Another added plus is that Hollywood has not managed to ruin a good thing -- a film that truly makes one THINK about what they have just seen. I cannot help but put another role as a schizophrenic into play -- that of Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind." When you see these two films and attempt to add the similarities, about the only one that comes to mind IS the fact that schizophrenics are being represented and nothing more. Fiennes has left, for all intents and purposes, Crowe's portrayal in the dust, and if Hollywood has any guts come Oscar nomination time, they will credit a true acting triumph, rather than the orchestrated ones that usually win because of huge studio mounted pushes. "Spider" is the little film that could, did and should.
"Spider" is not an easy film to watch, but then seeing madness never is. There are those who will be turned off by it, or perhaps momentarily subjected to moments of quiet. Then again, others will cheer a peformance that is worthy of the accolade, "a job very well done indeed! BRAVO!" Cronenberg, as director, has launched a film that is as subdued and unassuming as a breath of air as it brushes past a cheek. The hollow streets, the absence of crowds and the delicate renderings of cast and crew alike, have conveyed a dream or as some would insist, a nightmare and forsaken a Hollywood beginning, middle and end.
I sincerely hope that "Spider" is not lost in the shuffle of films that will spill forth over the course of the spring, or be considered as "too arthouse" to warrant consideration by other than those who know absolute talent when it is put in front of them. This film is not "entertainment" per se, and that would be the wrong word to use. Rather, eye opening and thought provoking would be a more apt description. It's a step on the edge of the abyss and the eventual and catastrophic conclusion that must become Spider's reality.
It is minimalist and daring and I can't say strongly enough how much this ensemble cast has brought forth for our inspection. See this film and be amazed at it in all its consummate glory!

The Reader

Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

This isn't meet-cute. Fifteen-year-old schoolboy Michael Berg (David Kross) first encounters his 36-year-old future lover Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) by throwing up in her doorway. It's a dismal rainy day in a German city in 1958 and he has taken ill on the way home from school. She cleans him up and accompanies him to his family. He turns out to have scarlet fever, and is kept at home for months. Once he's well again he goes back carrying a bunch of flowers to thank Hanna for her kindness, but realizes he's turned on, and bolts in embarrassment while she's bathing. Eventually Michael returns and happily loses his virginity. A regular ritual of reading, bathing, and lovemaking develops between him and Hanna. He reads to her; she bathes him; the sex is mutual. She is a tram conductor with a harsh manner, and several huge secrets. She seems to be using Michael, but she's also enjoying him mightily, and he is reaping enormous rewards, though his affair puts pressure on his relations with family and schoolmates.

Bernhard Schlink's original The Reader was an international bestseller. A lawyer and judge who writes, Schlink departed from his usual detective stories with this novel that becomes a meditation on Nazism--the denial of the surviving participants and the incomprehension of Germans like Michael who were born in the aftermath. Michael's feelings toward Hanna become much more complicated than simply those of a youth introduced to love by an older woman--as complicated as the feelings of Germans about the demons in their modern past. As for Hanna, she seems to understand nothing and to be more concerned about how she appears than what she has done.

The book is in three parts. First there is the love affair of the schoolboy and the tram conductor, which ends abruptly and painfully when Hanna suddenly disappears. In the second part it's eight years later and Michael is a law student attending trials of Nazis with fellow students and their seminar teacher, Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz). One day the young man is horrified and riveted to learn one of the defendants is none other than his long lost Hanna. She turns out to have been an SS guard at a satellite of Auschwitz and she's on trial with five other women for allegedly allowing several hundred prisoners to burn to death locked inside a church. This trial paralyzes Michael. He has never gotten over his first, interrupted love idyll with Hanna. Now he is filled with guilt for having loved her but also a sense that he should help her when he realizes he has information that might lower her sentence.

The last part, thirty years later, consists of several brief visits by Michael, first to Hanna in prison, then to the posh Manhattan flat of a Jewish woman, Rose Mather (Lena Olin), who was at the trial. She was one of the survivors and wrote a book about her experiences that was used in evidence. This provides a kind of coda.

Schlink's novel is neat and arresting, a page-turner that conceivably makes you think. Its Holocaust issues are cunningly intertwined with a sensuous--and rather peculiar--coming-of-age story told by a sensitive man still struggling to understand his experience and his country's. I read the book with interest, but found it a bit contrived. This together with Stephen Daldry's previous choice to film Michael Cunningham's The Hours shows a weakness on the English director's part for stories that are a little too clever and schematic.

This time the screenplay by the British playwright David Hare does damage to the book by altering its chronology, chopping it up and muddling the original linear three-part structure. Hare has said in interviews that the interpolated device of Michael's telling his story to his grown daughter was necessary to make sense of his voice-over. (That,however, is debatable.) Having settled on this device, Hare felt obligated to keep interjecting the mature Michael, played by Ralph Fiennes, at points throughout the film. The omnipresence of Fiennes' glum face undermines the sense of the young Michael's eagerness and, later, shock and confusion.

Fiennes as Michael revisits a cosmetically aged Kate Winslet as Hanna three decades later when she is about to be released from prison. Michael could never bring himself to visit her, but sent her tapes of himself reading the same books he read to her during their affair. Fiennes is a cold fish, hard to relate to the lively and sweet personality of young David Kross.

The film is hampered from the outset by its use of the outmoded artifice of dramatizing a story that takes place in another country and another language and yet having everyone speak English, with several of the main characters played by Brits (Winslet, Fiennes) putting on German accents. Bruno Ganz speaks with less of a German accent than they do.

There is much of interest in this glossy production, beautifully photographed on location by two of the best DP's in the business, Chris Menges and Roger Deakins. Ganz's professor is an ambiguous, subtle characterization. But since the drama of the unfolding story has been destroyed by breaking it up into pieces, the only thing that remains alive and beautiful and strange are the love scenes between Kross and Winslet. There is good chemistry between the 18-year-old Kross and the 34-year-old Winslet, and their nude scenes are bold and intimate. It's only when the machinery of what Schlink and the filmmakers are trying to tell us about German guilt and denial goes into action that things begin to be clunky and cold. Unfortunately, that is a big part of the picture.