Anonymous (2011)
Directed by: Roland Emmerich
In a New York theatre, trench-coated Derek Jacobi soliloquises about the greatness of Shakespeare’s works, and then tantalises his audience with the suggestion – no, assertion – that Will was not in fact the author. The scene shifts to early 17th century London where playwright Ben Johnson (Sebastian Armesto), clutching a pile of papers, is chased through the streets of London by soldiers who eventually manage to burn him out of the Globe Theatre and arrest him, sans folio.
The story now moves back by five years, when the middle-aged Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere (Rhys Ifans), gives a manuscript to Johnson, telling him to stage the work under his own name. But Johnson’s artistic integrity and pride will not permit him to sully his hands with the work of an amateur, so he ignores the play. Low-life, boozing actor Will Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), semi-literate (he can read but not write), has no such qualms and claims authorship of the play. The scene shifts once again, forty years earlier, when a juvenile Edward puts on a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the young Queen Elizabeth (Joely Richardson).
There are so many, nested flashbacks in the first few minutes of Anonymous that I wondered if we were watching an Elizabethan version of Betrayal. In fact the action moves forward and backward throughout the movie, and covers such a long timeframe that Elizabeth is played by two actresses (Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave) and Edward De Vere by three. The Earl of Southampton, who is revealed to be both the illegitimate son and grandson of the not-so Virgin Queen, is played by two, while other members of the cast span the decades with nothing more than makeup to assist them.
The central conceit of the movie is not merely that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays and sonnets, but that one of his main aims in doing this anonymously was to be able to disseminate material that would polemicise against the wrongs of the age, notably the pernicious influence of William Cecil (David Thewlis) and his son, Robert (Edward Hogg) the chief advisors to Elizabeth and her successor, James of Scotland. Thus it is primarily a political thriller and one in which the boorish Shakespeare has little role. Instead, from around the halfway mark, the movie concerns itself much more with the machinations over the succession to the ageing Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave), with the Cecils supporting James, while Southampton and, to some extent, Oxford support the Earl of Essex.
Emmerich gives us a generally well-depicted Elizabethan period, although there is a distinct sense of “Look at the extent and detail of our computer modelling!” about the several aerial swoops over London. The acting is generally solid (Redgrave is excellent) and Armesto does a great job as Johnson who realises, as Oxford’s plays bring undreamt-of fame to Shakespeare, that he has blown his chances. He sits despondently through one performance after another, looking increasingly like a Tudor version of the fifth Beatle (surely, by the way, it can only be a matter of time before the rumours start to circulate, and a director gives us a movie claiming the Fab Four’s hits were not penned by Lennon and McCartney but by Morecambe and Wise).
Both Cecils are good, though Robert’s character makes a very abrupt shift from barely competent apprentice to fully-fledged super-schemer immediately upon the death of his father. Only Rhys Ifans seems to strike a duff note (and I suspect it’s more a problem of direction than of acting), his later-years makeup making him look like Peter O’Toole’s Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha, while his expression as he watches his plays reminded me a little too much of Ralph Fiennes’ turn as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List.
There was a risk this movie would be nothing more than an expensive, star-studded remake of a Monty Python sketch (this one, if you’re interested). Anonymous just about escapes that fate, though it’s a close call. Entertaining, in a fairly ludicrous way.
