Anonymous (2011) Reviews

It barely takes a couple of minutes of screen time before it becomes obvious that Roland Emmerich's much-mocked Anonymous is going to be a feast of bad acting. Long before the astonishingly inept Rafe Spall turns up doing another of his patented whiney silly singsong voices as Will Shakespeare we're treated to the sight of Ben Johnson being arrested by guards straight out of Monty Python and taken to a dungeon where a Montgomery Burns lookalike is waiting with an EX-cellent red hot poker. It doesn't get much better. As if Spall playing Shakespeare like a bad and very drunk Frankie Howard impersonator wasn't bad enough (he even dives into the mosh pit at one point), Trystan Gravelle's Christopher Marlowe (looking surprisingly healthy for someone who had been dead for five years at the time his scenes are set) is an "Ooh, get her dearie" queen with a nasal twang who makes Kenneth Williams sound butch, Jamie Campbell Bower plays the young Oxford like a sulky boy band pinup without the depth while Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave play Elizabeth I as an incestuous girly flirt dropping illegitimate sprogs all over the kingdom and a batty old broad respectively. Rhys Ifans' Oxford and Sebastian Armesto's Ben Jonson come off the best, but even they have their Monty Python moments.

In fact, the performances are so universally dire that it's impossible not to conclude that the British cast are simply taking the piss out of Emmerich and his hapless writer John Orloff, for truly this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing so much as the conspiracy theorists' ability to conjure an unlikely alternate reality by citing the lack of physical evidence for one thing as conclusive proof of its polar opposite for which no physical proof exists either, no matter how fragile and unlikely the hypothesis. That it was first mooted by a man called - and I'm not making this up - J. Thomas Looney, author of Shakespeare Identified, should tell you all you need to know...

Yet the idea that Shakespeare never wrote a word of the plays that bear his name and was a minor cog in a major political conspiracy could, in a capable writer's hands, have made for a ripping yarn. Certainly dafter takes on history have provided plenty of entertainment in the past, while even The Da Vinci Code managed to wrap up its long-debunked conspiracy in a successful chase-cum-puzzle-solving format that had appeal to an audience way beyond the tinfoil hat brigade. Yet Anonymous' biggest problem isn't the central conceit which lumps in two unlikely Tudor conspiracies for the price of one or even that it doesn't make a convincing case, it's that it's poor drama and an even poorer historical thriller that constantly veers into outrageous camp comedy as if even the writer doesn't really believe any of it himself and is just having a bit of a lark between the chunks of clumsy historical exposition.

There's also an unfortunate undercurrent of snobbery behind its thesis that one of the common rabble could not possibly have written such plays and that only a rich noble of breeding - an heir to the very throne itself, no less - could show such insight into the human condition that might be vaguely offensive if the film weren't so clumsily executed. (J. Thomas Looney's politics were decidedly neo-fascist, with a belief in the inherent superiority of the nobility, a longing for a return of feudal rule by one's `betters' and a hatred of the democracy that gave the common man a say in his fate.) Much is made of Shakespeare's supposed illiteracy, though bad spelling is fairly common among major writers (some, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustav Flaubert, Leonardo Da Vinci and Hans Christian Andersen, even suffered from dyslexia) while the most successful composer of the 20th Century, Irving Berlin, never learned to read or write music but hired arrangers to do it for him. Yet while it tears Shakespeare down and turns him into a drunken buffoon and murderer, it never builds Oxford up into a credible alternative.

It's a conspiracy that makes no sense. If the absence of any manuscripts in Shakespeare's handwriting rules him out of being their author, why doesn't the absence of any manuscripts in Oxford's rule him out as well? Similarly the film never addresses the question of why a man who was a popular playwright and poet as well as a major patron of the theatre would need to hire a front for his works when his plays were publicly performed under his own name in his lifetime or even why his surviving mature poetry is so stylistically different from Shakespeare's. The idea that it was to hide a political subtext in his plays, some of which the film implies were written years before the historical events they're supposedly commenting on, doesn't hold much water since most of the examples given don't really have any hidden political agenda - they're just the famous bits everyone knows. The only tangible one comes from Richard III, despite the inconvenient fact that the play that actually was performed prior to the events in the film's climax being, er, Richard II. But then, why let the facts get in the way of a half-baked secret history some imaginary `they' want to suppress?

Emmerich has certainly made films with premises just as silly, yet in the past he's been able to make them play as engaging adventures or entertainingly jaw-dropping displays of special effects spectacle as he alternately destroys or saves the world while ensuring that cute kids and cuddly dogs survive unscathed. Some of that technical proficiency seeps through in the impressive production design and special effects recreating a spectacular Tudor London, even cheekily copying the opening shot from Olivier's Henry V along the way. Emmerich and his team may have managed to make a $30m film look like a $100m epic, but they're still working with a tuppence ha'penny script that's watchable if you're in a tolerant mood but dramatically flat as it veers all over the place, rarely focussing on anyone long enough for us to care whether they live or die, let alone what they wrote. The dreary digital photography that drowns everything in a flat fog of grey and beige as if under the delusion that it adds a sense of dramatic gravitas to the proceedings simply saps what little life is left out of it all. Forget the historical inaccuracies or the nonsensical conspiracies piled on conspiracies, it's the deadly dullness of it all that deals the fatal blow to this Fakespeare. As two minor characters note, "How will it end?" "Tragically, I should suppose."

Not much to get excited about in the way of extras, either - some redundant deleted scenes, self-serving featurettes and directors commentary on the DVD with the odd additional featurette on the Blu-ray.