Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s unspoken greatest. “For you, the city, thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere.” So says the Roman general, contemptuous of the citizens he has defended with his life, and upon close contact, sees that they are little more than rabble. Fiennes plays this immaculately, portraying the extreme, easily wounded pride of a man who is clearly suffering in his attempt to appear palatable to the masses. It doesn’t go well. And so he abandons them, and falls into the arms of his former enemy. It’s a magnificent indictment of unlimited democracy, and the paradox of the necessity of democratic deference to a kernel of authoritarianism if any semblance of democracy is to survive. Democracy without limits consumes itself. The irony is that Rome forfeited what could have been a luxuriant and prosperous 50-year reign at the hands of the man they, in their ignorant gluttony, exile, making him an enemy. Pearls before swine. I am a monarchist because I am a democrat, and I wish severe limits placed on democracy because I so desperately wish it to survive.
