DVD reviews: Coriolanus | W.E.

Published on 04/06/2012 00:00

ALISTAIR HARKNESS casts his critical eye on this week’s DVD releases

Coriolanus

Lionsgate, £19.99

W.E.

StudioCanal, £17.99

ACTORS aren’t always the most natural visual storytellers when they step behind the camera. Their comfort zone is performance, so their efforts tend to be dialogue-heavy and actor-driven. That’s sort of the case with Ralph Fiennes, but in choosing to make a big-screen version of Coriolanus he’s found a way to make something that plays to his strengths, while also allowing him to flourish as an actual filmmaker. Modernising the source material, he’s re-imagined this tale of a banished Roman general as a contemporary urban war movie that makes full use of cinema’s capacity for visceral imagery to match the violent, pugnacious spirit of the language. The result is a gutsy (and gut-spilling) adaptation of one of the Bard’s lesser-known works, one that embraces the need to constantly play catch-up with the story to keep us off balance and on edge. As Coriolanus, Fiennes is certainly quite a sight to behold. As he prowls through smoke-filled battle zones, skinhead and face zebra-streaked with blood, he looks for all the world like a leaner, meaner Colonel Kurtz – a man as contemptuous of his battle scars as he is of the public in whose defence he acquired them. He also proves himself an efficient director of action and even manages to get a good performance out of Gerard Butler as Coriolanus’s atavistic nemesis Aufidius. All in all, it’s a very capable and credible effort.

The same cannot be said of Madonna’s latest attempt to conquer the film world. With W.E. (her second directorial effort after 2008’s little seen Filth and Wisdom), she makes a curious bid for artistic credibility with yet another biopic of Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom King Edward VIII gave up the throne. Presenting the social-climbing Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) as a tragic figure whose own sacrifices have, according to the film, been forgotten about in the desperation to celebrate the fairytale aspects of the abdication story, Madonna (who also co-wrote the script) fails to convincingly outline what those sacrifices even are, let alone why we should care. Indeed, groaning platitudes about the damaging nature of fame and the despicable way rumours take hold as fact say more about the director’s view of the world than Simpson’s. In the end W.E. is compulsively bad, a little bit mad, but mostly just insignificant.

• To order these DVDs, call The Scotsman on 01634 832789