Anonymous
2 stars (out of 4)
Rated: PG
Anonymous is what you might call a Shakespearean whodunit, since it vigorously disputes the Bard’s authorship of all those wonderful plays, sonnets and poems.
It’s also completely preposterous. The film posits that it was not the humble actor from Stratford-upon-Avon who wrote the works credited to William Shakespeare, but rather Edward de Vere, the powerful 17th century Earl of Oxford in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who was obliged by politics to hide his writing prowess.
This isn’t the first time the Oxford-as-Shakespeare thesis has been advanced, and serious scholars treat it about as seriously as they do 9/11 deniers and sighters of Elvis.
Anonymous is simply the most audacious of the pro-Oxford arguments, advanced by director Roland Emmerich with the same unbridled enthusiasm as when he had space aliens blowing up the White House (Independence Day) or Mayans predicting the end of the world (2012).
Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff obviously don’t care if the story is true or not, or if they sully Shakespeare’s name in the telling of it.
Their William Shakespeare, played by Rafe Spall, is a semi-literate lout, a boozing, whoring, blackmailing thief who has no qualms about perpetuating a fraud as long as enough gold crosses his palm.
He’s right at home in Emmerich’s greasy envisioning of Elizabethan times, where candles and grey dawns barely crack the accurate gloom, serving history while failing to illuminate it.
The whole shebang is framed by a wheezy 21st century prologue and epilogue, with Derek Jacobi intoning like the narrator of an old Saturday Night Live Bad Theatre sketch, promising startling revelations.
But if you can tolerate this arrant nonsense — and that’s a big if — Emmerich has another trick up his sleeve, one far more pleasing.
It’s the surprise casting of Rhys Ifans, that constant clown of British rom-coms, in the serious role of Oxford, a choice that suddenly seems miraculous. Ifans plays opposite Vanessa Redgrave’s Elizabeth, another casting coup that seems by Providence sent.
They and other fine actors nimbly tread the rotten boards of this story, which also states that Elizabeth was a randy minx of a monarch, whose many tumbles included an incestuous union that resulted in a secret son.
Early on, Anonymous points the finger at another suspected Shakespeare ghostwriter, rival playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto), who at first glimpse of the late 16th century is being tortured by the Queen’s officious henchman Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg).
Cecil suspects that Oxford is up to something and that Jonson knows it, because there’s no way the bumpkin Shakespeare could have written plays of such “seditious” erudition as Hamlet and Henry V.
What follows is a blinding series of time shifts that seek to hammer square pegs into the many round holes of the Oxford argument. It’s not enough for Oxford to be a genius in disguise; he also has to have been a child genius, having both penned A Midsummer’s Night Dream and played the character Puck before the delighted eyes of the young Queen Elizabeth (Joely Richardson, Redgrave’s enchanting real daughter).
Oxford is taken under the Queen’s wing, and then into her bedroom, and although his libido is never curtailed, his artistic instincts are. He’s embroiled in a power play where the crown of Elizabeth’s Tudors is at risk of seizure by the manoeuvering Cecils, who are under the steely watch of Robert’s father William (David Thewlis, appropriately menacing).
It would ill behoove Oxford, now played by Ifans in manhood, to turn all arty in the midst of this, despite his incredible ability to knock off a work like Richard III, seemingly in an afternoon.
He keeps his talent and his plays hidden (“I have a reputation to protect”), but a visit to a stage play, accurately depicted as being akin to a circus, fires him up as he realizes the power of ideas to move the masses: “All art is political!”
Oxford conspires to have his plays performed under Jonson’s name, but the highly principled latter will have none of it, even if it means his head might roll. The unscrupulous Shakespeare steps in to take Jonson’s place as the fraudulent Bard-to-be, but only after first submitting the reluctant Oxford to a little blackmail.
Anonymous is so dubious in its intent and so tangled in its execution, it might have worked better as a comedy like Notting Hill or The Boat That Rocked, where Ifans could agreeably play the fool as before.
Yet the Welsh actor must have realized that he had to make the best of his situation. Given the rare opportunity of a dramatic lead, he creates a deeply shaded Oxford whom you can believe in without having to wear a tinfoil hat.
He’s marvelously matched with Redgrave, a mix of silk and steel in her best role in years. She likewise must have sussed that it’s better to float atop a swamp than to drown in it.
Peter Howell is a syndicated movie critic for the Toronto Star.