While the situations tended to comedic extremes, the underlying relationships were touchingly real, and of course I know something about being a “trailing spouse.” Ultimately, the charm of Emily Blunt and Jason Segel carried the day and made us forgive absurdities such as the wedding finale. One of the best comic absurdities, played absolutely straight, was the career involved: a post-doc position, at which the heroine was not very good, in an apparently useless academic career. As usual in a Judd Apatow production, the ancillary characters ranged from perfect to hilarious. And speaking of Apatow, it’s time to give him some credit: there’s nothing profound or even intense about his relationship flicks, but all share a gentleness and strike familiar chords. I’m reminded, at the moment, of Trollope.

I’m trying to think of one thing in this movie that wasn’t absurd, but I can’t come up with anything. Start with why the Scandinavian gorgeous (and smart and sensitive) Diana would be in love with Roger, her short, creepy, pompous husband. Next, how Roger expects to get millions by fencing a stolen Rubens that is a) well documented, b) small and c) not very good. Then there is the dashing Dane whose plan to become ceo while still employed by a rival firm involves murdering five or six people. The climactic showdown between the killer Clas and the amateur Roger is as full of credibility holes as Clas’s body becomes. The movie’s tone is a mess: scenes of potential terror are pierced by absurd bits of humor: Roger hiding from death by submerging in a latrine, then driving a tractor down the road with a pit bull impaled on the tines. But most of all, there is this problem at the movie’s core: the ‘hero’ is someone we just don’t care about. He’s a cad in his marriage, an arrogant snob at his job, and a petty thief on the side. We’re supposed to root for him?

As with every Shakespeare play, I wish I had read at least the first two acts before witnessing the production, to familiarize myself with the dialogue as well as the characters. Not having done this, I found 50% of the lines unintelligible, despite the actors’ good efforts. Nevertheless, the acting was so good that the meat of the argument rang through, and by play’s end I was riveted.
Kudos first and foremost for Ralph Fiennes’s conception, the best updating of Shakespeare I have ever seen. The modern – TV news and tanks – coexisted with the historical – addressing the public in the forum and knife fights – seamlessly. We didn’t know what era we were in, but it was a timeless one. And that, I believe, was Fiennes’s point: the political views of Shakespeare’s play ring as true today as they did in Elizabethan England or ancient Rome. Government by the people? A bad idea. Government by the politicians? Just as bad. I see today’s Republicans intent on nothing but bringing down Obama, and I see Shakespeare’s tribunes undermining Caius Martius. And how different are the Occupy Wall Streeters from the Roman citizens demonstrating for grain?
Finally, the acting is superb: Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia, Brian Cox as Menenius, Jessica Chastain (she is everywhere!) as Coriolanus’s wife and, of course, Fiennes himself as the tragic hero.

Yet another criminal underworld is brought to the cinema: the world of Belgian cattle dopers. Nor are we familiar with Walloons as a different subspecies. But all this is windowdressing for the central portrayal of a man gone mad, a man obsessed with his body in compensation for what he lacks, a man who finally loses control and exposes us to his brutalizing, brutalized world. This is powerful, not pretty stuff, made the more interesting and watchable by the alien world it takes place in.