When in Rome

Modern-dress Shakespeare is a chancy affair. As often as it is successful, like Julie Taymor's ancient-modern mashup Titus, it can be just as often gimmicky (certain aspects of the Baz Luhrmann Romeo+Juliet) or a bloody mess (the Australian gangland Macbeth is one of the worst filmed Shakespeare adaptations I've ever seen and most definitely my worst-ever blind buy). As with every other directorial decision, displacing time needs to be justified: why should this text of 400 years of age be re-set in modern times? What does it have to say to us today? Titus worked so well because it took an obscure and sort of crappy play and turned it into a meditation on humanity's timeless penchant for violence. Ralph Fiennes' take on Coriolanus, another lesser-known Roman piece, albeit one much higher in quality, is quite happily a success: more than an exercise in cleverness, it makes the Renaissance writing and the classical conflicts viscerally immediate.

Our story takes place in "a place calling itself Rome," besieged from without by the Volsces, led by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and within, by grain shortages that have the people rioting. Caius Marcius (Fiennes), one of Rome's most decorated soldiers, spurns the rioters and their objections, and then proceeds to drive the Volsces from their city of Corioli, for which he is rechristened Coriolanus. His mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) convinces him to run for consul in spite of his contempt for popular rule, but two scheming tribunes, Sicinius (James Nesbitt) and Brutus (Paul Jesson), goad him into denouncing the masses, leading to his exile to Volsces territory, where he offers himself to Aufidius to lead a revenge campaign against Rome.

That's an awful lot of story to recap, but really I'm just scratching the surface. The Roman plays are Shakespeare's most politically-minded, and Coriolanus is thematically one of his richest, with its rival strains of democratic and elitist thought. Alas, this is chiefly why the play remains relatively unknown. Marcius has the distinction of being one Shakespeare's most opaque tragic heroes; he has only one soliloquy, here expunged, and so the audience's opinion of him is based entirely around his heated and often contemptuous interactions with other characters. His disgust with the plebians is a hard sell in a modern democracy, and is counter-balanced by the populace itself--fickle, ungrateful to its military protector, and easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.

It's not an easy piece, but Fiennes has confidence in it and takes it in fascinating directions. Whereas the original historical context of the story is the very early days of the Roman republic, shortly after the expulsion of the Tarquin kings, the Rome of the film is an apocalyptic, bombed-out urban shell that everywhere seems to be coming apart at the seams; had they referred to it as 'Athens,' the opening scenes could barely be considered fiction. DP Barry Ackroyd of the Bourne trilogy and The Hurt Locker, films the proceedings in his now trademark rough-hewn handheld camerawork, giving the movie an even grittier edge. All this is grounded further with the occasional BBC-style news report that serves the additional functions of condensing the text and easily communicating story developments. Occasionally the modern approach falters, like with a political-debate scene on a Sunday morning talk-show style set whose audience consists of the same couple dozen protesters we saw earlier. But by and large world is very well-realized.

At the center of it it stands Fiennes' Marcius, battle-scarred and bald-shaven. He lives to fight, if not with enemy soldiers then with his own people, and is patently unsuited for the political life that is expected of him. He is the end product of a society that has been at war so long that the violence has taken on a life of its own. The character is not likable per se, but neither is he trying to be. He is proud, but not boastful, and part of his antipathy towards the rabble is a refusal to pander to and flatter them. As a protagonist Marcius has his limitations, but Fiennes gives him as much seething life as can be imagined.

The performers that surround Fiennes, which also include Brian Cox as the sympathetic senator Menenius and Jessica Chastain as Marcius' wife Virgilia, are uniformly strong. The Jacobean English never sounds forced or out of place, which really is tremendous praise. Ultimately, however, the movie belongs to Fiennes, Butler, and Redgrave. Butler is capable, but Aufidius isn't Shakespeare's most nuanced villain by a long shot; he is basically a mirror image of Marcius. What makes their dynamic so interesting is its barely-veiled homosexual subtext. Their close-quarters dueling at the beginning and end of the movie is an erotic death dance, given ample support by the text itself:

O Marcius, Marcius!
Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart
A root of ancient envy. If Jupiter
Should from yond cloud speak divine things,
And say 'Tis true,' I'ld not believe them more
Than thee, all noble Marcius. Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke
And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

This in turn is mirrored in the Oedipal shadings of Redgrave's performance. Her Volumnia worships her son but is also virtually the only character that can successfully challenge his headstrong stubbornness. She does so while occasionally donning a decidedly unfeminine military officer uniform. All of this working in tandem conveys a brutalizing masculinity that is driving the world over the edge. As Volumnia sniffs,

"Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding."

SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF A 400 YEAR-OLD STORY FOLLOW

That is basically what happens in the end. Marcius is a born fighter, and in true tragic fashion what dooms him is his betrayal of this nature, by relenting to his mother's pleas to halt the invasion of Rome. This isn't communicated as clearly as it could be, and in fact the ending is slightly altered. In the original play Aufidius whips the Volscian people into a frenzy against Marcius, who "kill'd my son.' 'My daughter.' '...my cousin Marcus.' '...my father,'" and who in turn refuses to abide an insult to his pride. In the movie it is merely the Volscian army that gangs up on him, and the ending speeches are jettisoned in favor of a final bloody embrace with Aufidius and the discarding of Marcius' corpse.

Aside from that admitted nitpick, however, and a few cut speeches that I missed (there's a exchange in the beginning of the play talking about the revolt against Marcius as the body's revolt against the belly; it's great writing, but probably would have slowed the action down too much), this is probably the best adaption of Coriolanus that could be hoped for, and one of the better filmed Shakespeares, period. It makes the original material extraordinarily relevant to the current zeitgeist, but without ever condescending to to work or the audience. Time, is on its side.

Why Othello is Almost as Funny as Falstaff

Tonight I attended a lecture by the new director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore, on using data-mining technology on the works of Shakespeare. The use of quantifying technology, typically associated with the sciences and other "real world" pursuits, with something as subjective as literature is novel, and offers many insights, not the least of which has to do with its own subjectivity.

The talk began with an obligatory crack about the Roland Emmerich Shakespeare authorship abortion slithering into theaters this Friday ("The media was asking me for the Folger's position on Anonymous. I told them we're a library; we don't have positions, we have collections.") and then gave some background information on his topic. As an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University was introduced to a program called Docuscope that breaks down text fed into it and assigns tags to different words based on the functions they serve. Originally intended for improving the writing skills of incoming freshmen, Witmore and his University of Glasgow colleague Jonathan Hope fed it Shakespeare's 36 plays and have been using it to analyze the results on grounds of genre.

Witmore's blog demystifies some of the technical aspects of how this works:

Docuscope, that is, codes words and “strings” of words based on the ways in which they render a world experientially for a reader or listener. The theory behind how texts do this, and thus the rational for Docuscope’s coding strategy, is derived from Michael Halliday’s systemic-function grammar. But what is particularly interesting about Docuscope is the human element involved in its creation. The main architect of the system, a rhetorician named David Kaufer, spent 8 years hand-tagging several million pieces of English according to their rhetorical function, and then expanded out this initial tagging spread with wild-card operators so that Docuscope now classes over 200 million strings of English (1 to 10 words in length) into over 100 distinct categories of use or function.

The resulting data clusters, they found, would belong in certain categories, while being (categorically?) excluded from others--given text chunks would be characteristic of ABC, but not XYZ. Add these together and you'd get a Gaussian scatter plot, divided among Tragedy, Comedy, History, and the Late Romances of Shakespeare. The purest Comedy section came from The Merry Wives of Windsor, while the purest History was a scene from Richard II, which after consideration most would probably agree is the least funniest of the History plays.

How these results were reached all have to do with the generic criteria at work. As Witmore described it, comedy often involves two people plotting away, which involves a lot of 'I' and 'you' exchanges, setting in motion a snowballing series of misunderstandings. A hallmark of History, by contrast, is heavily descriptive dialogue, which makes sense considering the sheer amount of, well, history that needs to be conveyed.

These distinctions lead to the seemingly unusual grouping of Othello with The Merry Wives of Windsor in comedy. Its plot, recall, revolves on an elaborate scheme of mounting falsehoods to trick Othello into suspecting his wife of cuckoldry. Familiar comic territory, but punctuated with the horrible success of Iago's stratagem.

An obvious objection to this computerized approach to textual analysis is that its reasoning is circular. A computer program can only find what its programmers tell it to find, so how can it actually tell us anything new? Witmore was asked such a question in the follow-up Q&A (I think. It was by an analyst who works with similar data, and so the wording was far more technical and above my pay grade.), and his response was, essentially, that one had to find a balance, that overly detailed programming would indeed provide narrow and redundant results.

I myself had a hard time getting past the issue of the premises Docuscope is given, but it seems its real strength is in allowing us to re-examine our notions of genre and classification of plays. Witmore mentioned to me that one of the other surprising results was the grouping in History of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and this had all to do with the extensive descriptive language in the play, plus the whole Pyramus and Thisby episode. One can actually track the points in a play where it veers into different territory, he said. More accurate than identifying plays by genre is their tendency towards a given genre.

Thus the usefulness of the Docuscope approach is in fact its strict logic. Though we may know what we're telling it when we input its text tagging parameters, its thoroughness and consistency in applying them will show us things we may not have before considered.

Toil and Trouble

Scottland, PA was honestly disappointing. It wasn’t bad, the performances were strong, and I chuckled through it, but the material never really took off, and for a concept like “Macbeth transplanted to fast food” it was a real letdown. Part of it was the setting, the 1970s, which I wasn’t expecting and took awhile to catch onto. That’s my own fault, but it’s also something of a problem in itself in that it takes a very familiar story from the 17th century, brings it into the 1970s, but looks and sounds like the late 90s, making it (especially in the beginning) feel artificial and hard to get into. A much larger problem is the direction, which was just… flat. The rock songs on the soundtrack were more distracting than enhancing (except for a slow motion track on the McBeths that doesn’t last nearly long enough for its rude interruption to be fully effective), the general cinematography is television bland (forgivable, I suppose, since it’s an indie), and the lighting—in particular the soft red/orange that the Mcbeths were constantly covered in—was obnoxious. There were a few nice moments that worked, like Mcbeth catching sight of the “Witches” and knocking Duncan into the deep fryer was, and the previously mentioned slomo shot, even if it was cut short. There’s some real potential, and I’ll keep my ears open for what the director does next. But the product we have never rises to hysterical levels. The weirdness of the Weird ‘Sisters’ feels forced, even with Andy Dick on board, and character traits like McDuff’s vegetarianism or Donald being gay are just…there. Maybe this is one of those things that’s just not for me.

A Very Scary Christmas: Theater of Blood

[Note: I'm watching a bunch of horror films, mostly slashers, for research for a script I'm writing, and I figured I could start generating content on here again if I posted my reactions. This is the first such entry in a series titled, entirely due to the season, A Very Scary Christmas. Enjoy, whoever you are.]

To my shame I’m not familiar with Vincent Price’s body of work (outside of an old Tim Burton animation short about a boy who thinks he’s—wait for it—Vincent Price), but Theater of Blood, less of a detour in the series of horror films I’ve lately been watching than one might think, is a delightful introduction. Essentially, Price plays Edward Lionheart, a Shakespearean actor who attempted suicide after failing to win a prestigious award and proceeds to kill the critics who snubbed him, in the manner of death of characters from Shakespeare plays, delivering some of those plays’ best and most well-known speeches all the while. Shakespeare contrived some particularly nasty deaths in his day, and so the movie’s violence isn’t entirely shocking, but that some of it is as graphic as it is, is startling when one considers it came years before Dawn of the Dead, and still a year in front of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is actually much less bloody than its reputation would suggest.*

But then again, the mayhem is played obviously for laughs (it contains one of the most hilariously methodical decapitations I’ve ever seen) and most of the critics are ciphers anyway. This makes it, bizarrely, something of a proto-slasher film, insomuch as it contains elaborate killings committed by a madman against a number of barely-defined schmucks, a formula that would be refined in John Carpenter in 1978 with a focus on developing the victims rather than the killer (as well as significantly lowering their age), and then be bastardized and codified just a year later with Friday the 13th, which prized sensationalism over character, story, logic, and basic technical competence. The key difference between Theater of Blood and Halloween’s debased progeny, of course, is there is actual talent at work: Price tackles the role of an egotistical ham actor with gleeful abandon; the script by Anthony Greville-Bell is smartly written, drawing from several obscure plays in the Shakespeare canon for its kills but setting them up enough to let neophytes know what’s going on, and containing some nice, dry one-liners; and in an unexpected twist, Michael J. Lewis’ melodramatic score is surprisingly well-done and fits perfectly with Lionheart’s antic disposition.

I’ll add for the sake of completeness that the kills require a ludicrous degree of meticulous planning (even granted the help Lionheart is receiving, he puts to shame the Rube Goldberg scenarios of Saw’s Jigsaw killer), one of them (Othello) is less funny than mean and so not effective, and a late twist is aimed less at the other characters than the audience and as a result is kind of silly, but that’s the movie in a nutshell: it’s all silly and never plausible beyond the confines of the story, but it’s always aware of that (though the characters never are—a distinction that makes Lionheart campy, not cloyingly stupid), and it’s never condescending. Due to the robust stomach and possible Shakespeare geekery necessary, Theater of Blood’s appeal might be somewhat limited, but those who can clear those hurdles will find a bloody good time to be had.

*Edited to correct dates of release

No dejected havior in this visage

Apparently a contemporary portrait of William Shakespeare, the first of its kind, has come to light, having sat in a private collection for 300 years. The few likenesses of Shakespeare we have were created after his death; this portrait is thought to have been the original from which the Folio picture is derived.



I'm still not sure how to react to it. There certainly is a resemblance between the two portraits. That it may have come from Southampton would in my mind strongly support its authenticity, given his patronage of Shakespeare. The outfit is quite fancy, but let us not forget Shakespeare was a very successful stakeholder in the Globe, and his family was able to afford a coat of arms in 1596. Dismissing its possible inaccuracy due to a tendency to idealize the subject of a painting during the Elizabethan era is silly; by that logic, what good are any portraits from that time period?

But this is hardly a game-changer if it is authentic. We don't know who commissioned it, and it is still, only a painting. Stratford would have us think it offers new insights into Shakespeare's purported bisexuality, but then again they would say that, wouldn't they? Their industry depends on continuous scholarly and popular interest in Shakespeare, regardless of whether or not there is any new information to have actually been unearthed. Bill Bryson has a refreshingly brief survey of how little we actually do know about the man, which made for a much-needed antidote the inflated (self-)importance and deification I saw in Stratford. Given how Shakespeare has been so Disneyfied by his town of birth, I lean towards caution rather than further bombast.

We have a better picture of who the man was, but it is a picture all the same.

EDIT: I will add, though, this is a considerably more dashing rendition than the Chandor portrait, and also turns his beard red.

The Tempest is Music to My Ears

Elliot Goldenthal is set to score his partner/wife Julie Taymor's adaptation of The Tempest, which will hopefully be out next year. Goldenthal is my favorite film composer (his Alien3 work is frightening stuff, and Titus has an amazing eclecticism), and while it was a given that he would do the soundtrack--he's worked in conjunction with Taymor for years--it's nice to see it in writing and confirmed.