Anonymous

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
— Romeo & Juliet, Act II, Scene II

Does it matter if Shakespeare was a fraud? I ask this in all seriousness. Personally, I have no idea what Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed or Jesus actually looked like. I know what other people think they looked like (well, all except Mohammed, of course). I would also bet that phrases, deeds and wisdom have been artificially attributed to every single one of these figures, not unlike people still claiming Yogi Berra-isms. Isn’t the idea of Confucius more important than the actual man? It is to me. So here’s my dilemma – the idea of Shakespeare is more important to me than the actual man, but here’s a movie so determined to tell me about the man that it assassinates his character, buries it, lets it rot a week, then digs it up, zombifies it and kills it again for good measure. According to Anonymous, the real life William Shakespeare was an illiterate drunk, opportunist, fraud weasel. And a Grade A bona fide jerk.

Good thing Anonymous really isn’t about Billy Bob Stratford-upon-avon. Instead, we’re giving the credit for the entire works of William Shakespeare to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). I’m so used to Rhys playing goofy, I forgot he can play it straight; and he’s so good at being a noble here, he’s almost too stiff for the role. This story is primarily the Earl’s, a man who, by this legend at least, concealed his writing for being below his station. When Anonymous stops being about who-wrote-what and why, the film actually becomes a decent political thought piece.

Anonymous is told in several timelines, and it’s confusing. There’s a flashback inside a flashback within the first fifteen minutes of screen time. Another puzzle is the fact that characters exist in separate timelines played by disparate actors of appropriate ages, however, there are two sets of actors paying different characters in different ages who look closer in appearance to the actors playing the same character in different ages. You can tell the screenwriter got caught up in this, too. A smokin’ romantic interlude between thirty-something Queen Elizabeth and the Teen Earl (my favorite Doo Wop tune, btw) is almost spoiled in my mind by her comparing the young man to his Shakespearean characters … how is this possible when the works of Shakespeare weren’t introduced to the world until Elizabeth was in her fifties? “Oh … when you’re [queen] you know all those things.” There’s an uncommonly massive amount of Queen Elizabeth (Joely Richardson, young, and Vanessa Redgrave, old) in this film; even if you wrote Shakespeare in Love, you’d never guess how much her story intertwined with Shakespeare’s.

If you can keep the time lines and characters straight, and you don’t mind that Shakespeare is portrayed as buffoon, and of course you don’t mind costume drama or wordy films, well, you just might enjoy this one. I did.

This tale is bookended as a play narrated by Derek Jacobi in the present. We open to a stage with Derek telling us the tale of how we’ve been deceived by the insidious Shakespeare rah rah crowd. The final shot returns back to the stage and we get to play audience-watching-audience again. It doesn’t work. When I see this kind of invention, all I can think is, “oh, so it was just fiction; one pretentious account with no real proof to back it.” If this is the intention of Anonymous, well, it worked, but it surely detracts from a pretty good tale of political intrigue.

Rated PG-13, 130 Minutes
D: Roland Emmerich
W: John Orloff, what did the Shakespeare people do to this guy, anyway?
Genre: Revisionist history
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: The “William Shakespeare is a big fat fraud” fan club
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Illiterates