Hey y’all, want to get an academic’s bloomers in a bunch at an alarming speed?
Then I present to you Anonymous, this year’s most ridiculous and unnecessary film. The tagline asks, “Was Shakespeare a Fraud?” The movie doesn’t so much answer this question as punch you with a fist of highly-wrought nonsense gloved in pretty words. The director takes a historical era and plays ‘What if?’ with the main players, kind of like The Da Vinci Code, but written by people who like to dress up as Othello after inhaling gasoline.
The film is based around the oft-heard conspiracy that William Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays. Who did then? In this interpretation it’s the noble Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans, hotter than usual) who wears as much make-up as the Queen and is visibly weighed down by his literary genius. This characteristic is stressed subtly by the camera zooming in on him clenching his fists and looking out the window every 10 seconds with an expression even Holden Caulfield would call overkill.
The Earl aims to inspire political change and can see that the playhouse is the place for it. Anonymous does an admirable job of expressing what a dirty, bawdy place theaters used to be in the past; you can almost taste the frothy ale being flung at you by a fine wench who wants a better view of the stage. The Earl needs a sucker with nothing to lose to be the front for his works, and after an attempt at seducing Ben Johnson into it, William Shakespeare takes the wheel. Jesus, does he ever.
Although the movie is lacking in (intentional) humour, there is a very crowd-pleasing performance in Rafe Spall’s portrayal of the actual Will Shakespeare. Spall plays Billy as a drunken, slutty actor (aren’t we all?) who is also illiterate. He seizes control of the authorship to the general dismay of the true writer who knows that immortality has just been granted to a buffoon. A life coach would probably say that Shakespeare has just demonstrated proactive business skills.
Apart from Shakespeare’s debauchery, the movie takes itself far too seriously. The actors stride around filthy London bellowing, “Poetry is my SOUL!” while thunder literally rolls in the distance. The emotional climax, an ass-clenchingly dramatic confession of incest, was almost drowned out by the sound of my boyfriend merrily giggling in the next seat.
Like literary history in general, this film is a bit of a sausage fest. Queen Elizabeth is the lone important female character and is portrayed like someone from Sex and the City: too preoccupied with whether the boys like her to notice that her country is doing the polka off a cliff. Bizarrely, she also has a veritable softball team of bastards roaming the kingdom who all manage to end up in the same room for tea. Not bad for a supposed Virgin Queen.
At over two hours, the film drags a bit. By the time a lisping King James shows up saying, “Isn’t theater marvvvvelouth?” you want to shout, “YUP!” and then knife yourself in the eye – a suitable Shakespearean ending to a wonderfully awful movie.
