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.

There are no bad people in this story, but (almost) all the people do bad things – the chief among them not telling the truth. There is always a good reason, one that seems, at the moment, more important than the truth. Seeing how each of the characters handles this personal dilemma is only one of many strengths of this marvelous movie, which deserves its Oscar win and was, in my view, the best film in any category at that event. The performances are so real as not to seem like acting, from the winsome 4-year-old to the grandfather with Alzheimer’s. Given chance after chance to explode in rage, whether at the person around them or their own fate, the main characters remain remarkably equable, which invites us into their minds: what are they thinking? what would I be thinking in that situation.  Although the judicial process on view may be uniquely Iranian, and the role of the specific religion is foreign, there is nothing uniquely Iranian about any of the behavior on display. Just yesterday, the Times reported that William Rehnquist had undoubtedly lied about a memo he wrote in order to get confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. And the New Orleans Saints coach, when confronted by NFL investigators, was no more honest than the father who said he didn’t know that the woman he pushed was pregnant. But what would happen to his daughter and his father if he was sent to jail? Isn’t that reason enough to shade the truth, a little bit?