ANONYMOUS (M) comes with inbuilt animosity. Acrimony will come from defendants of William Shakespeare who is accused of not being the author of the canon that has been attributed to him for the past four hundred years.
The premise that the Bard was a beard for a high born has been around for centuries and continues to canker like all conspiracy theories. It is a legitimate premise for a play or picture, but balance is needed in the conjecture and none seems evident in this confused confection.
The picture begins in a theatre with Stratford sceptic Derek Jacobi espousing Shakespeare’s sham directly to camera. The lens then pans us into Elizabethan England, where Ben Johnson and Kit Marlowe are established scribblers but the “swan of Avon” is a sot actor, able to read but not write. Silly stuff.
The shickered Shakespeare is played by Rafe Spall as a cod pieced cad that’s an affront to legitimate investigation. The bias is writ large in this portrayal of the Bard as a buffoon and bore and Shakespeare isn’t the only one to get short shrift – Marlowe is a cardboard cut-out killed by the Avon assassin. Ben Johnson fares better, but only just.
The ill Will of the piece aside, ANONYMOUS is a misconceived mess missing out many dramatic moments and virtually devoid of any leavening mirth. The script by John Orloff and direction by Roland Emmerich are so leadenly earnest the 130 minutes plays like 130 hours!
That’s not to say there are some nice characterisations, principally from the Redgrave mother daughter act with Vanessa playing the older Queen Elizabeth and Joely Richardson playing her at a younger age.
Finally, ANONYMOUS is an abject failure at forging the fiction that Shakespeare was a fraud, a fake, a front. It deserves anonymity.
(c) Richard Cotter
2nd November, 2011
Tags: ANONYMOUS, William Shakespeare, Derek Jacobi, Rafe Spall, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, John Orloff,Roland Emmerich, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson.
