****
The history itself maybe filled with holes,
but I’ll be darned if Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous isn’t a very
compelling film. A period conspiracy thriller, Anonymous supposes that
William Shakespeare was a borderline illiterate and only moderately talented
actor that through fate and guile got his name attached to the greatest
collected written works of the English language. Well-acted, immaculately
designed, and executed with a fair amount of competence, Anonymous may
be the best Hollywood surprise from the Toronto International Film Festival.
And yes, I mean that Roland Emmerich. In Anonymous,
you won’t see Shakespeare trying to thwart a global warning apocalypse, or
battle alien invaders in a fighter plane. Emmerich has built a solid and
consistent filmmaking portfolio of disaster porn, so much so that his last
film, 2012, contained just about every natural disaster imaginable. From
the beginning we wondered, can the man behind Stargate, Independence Day,
Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, do subtle? And the answer
is he can.
Emmerich’s last attempt at semi-serious
period filmmaking was The Patriot, a family drama set against the
backdrop of the American Revolution about a southern plantation owner who joins
the war effort to keep his eldest son out of trouble and get revenge on the
British officer that killed his younger boy. So technically, the movie should
have been called “The Revenger,” but leaving that aside, the film was awash in
politically correct historical revisionism. Even though these were still Mel
Gibson’s glory days, the idea of him being a benign slave owner seemed wrong.
But back to Shakespeare. Historical
revisionism is still on the plate, but what conspiracy theory doesn’t play fast
and loose with facts. One could say that Emmerich hasn’t been concerned with them
before, so why start now? Emmerich paints a convincingly real portrait of London at the dawn
of the 17th century. It’s mucky, it’s dirty, it’s textual and it
wonderfully draws you into the multilayered world of dissenting theatre and
intrigue in the royal court. If nothing else, this sets the stage wonderfully.
Veteran actor Derek Jacobi opens the show,
on stage in modern New York. Jacobi’s gravitas instantly draws you in and before you know it,
you’re sent back to Shakespearean London. We’re thrown into the deep end rather
quickly as playwright Ben Johnson (Sebastian Armesto) is interrogated about
certain manuscripts left to his possession. We flashback again a few years
earlier as Johnson’s latest work has the crowd rolling in the aisles, all at
the expense of William Cecil (David Thewlis), one of the Queen’s key advisors.
The play is shutdown, and Johnson arrested,
but he’s soon released at the courtesy of a mysterious benefactor who happens
to be Edward, the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). The Earl offers Ben a deal:
since he freed the playwright from the Tower, Johnson will pass off the Earl’s
plays as his own. The first one to be staged is a little piece called Henry
V, and it wows the crowd. Johnson, initially hesitant about taking credit
for another man’s work doesn’t rise to the crowd’s demand for the author, but
an actor in his company does. His name: Will Shakespeare.
Looking at the film, Anonymous is to
Shakespeare in Love, what JFK is to PT-109. It’s the
deconstruction of a myth as Rafe Spall’s portrayal of Shakespeare leans more to
the buffoonish, and more than a little dim. Naturally, Shakespeare goes from
grateful for the exposure, to thinking he’s the puppet master behind himself
and blackmailing Edward for more money. That was pretty predictable, but it
takes a lot of guile to take one of the most vaunted figures in Western history
and bring him down to a level of typical pettiness.
But the cast is excellent, led by Rhys
Ifans as Edward who plays cool and composed, but with a great deal of passion
and dubiousness. He just a man concerned with art and the written word, stuck
in a world where those are not supposed to be his concern because of his
station, yet his disappointment doesn’t get aired out by making some kind of
scene. Thewlis is appropriately slivery as Cecil, even if the character is a
little too much the villain. And in an interesting twist, Emmerich casts
mother-daughter actresses Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson to play the
older and younger version of Queen Elizabeth I respectively.
But the one fatal flaw is that John Orloff’s
script tries to cram in so much; from the history, to the politics, to the
court room intrigue, to potential matters of incest, it would be like cramming
10 years of history of The War on Terror into one movie. We’re so hip deep in
plot as the film begins it takes a good 10 minutes to get your bearings and
know the players. There’s also a lot of formula in the film’s final act, but at
that point you’re either with the movie or you’re not.
My friend Ian reminded me that to academia
the notion that anyone but the man named Shakespeare actually authored his
plays is taken about as seriously as ancient alien theories, but it does make a
good story, like any conspiracy theory. Anonymous may play around with
facts, but that play is fun and rewarding to the audience. And if young people
can’t appreciate Shakespeare through the eyes of the guy always destroying the
world, then I guess nothing will. Even if there were giant lizards in
Elizabethan London.
