Anonymous (2011) Roland Emmerich

Production Budget: $30 million

Worldwide Gross: $15 million

At first glance I was surprised to see Roland Emmerich’s name attached to this project.  It would kind of now seeing Michael Bay direct a movie about the debate of whether Socrates was real or just a construct of Plato.  I don’t see anything scholarly coming from someone who made The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC, or 2012 but who knows.

Now while I am familiar with Shakespeares plays I can’t exactly weigh in on this debate of if he wrote it or if the Earl of Oxford wrote it.  I tend to go with the overwhelming historical consensus and their response which was the scholarly equivalent of a pimp slap to this movie.  At the end of the day I don’t really care that much.  On some level I guess I would want the proper guy get the proper credit but ultimately I don’t spend any time thinking about it.  The plays and the words are what matter because they are beautiful and it doesn’t matter to me if they were penned by Shakespeare or Anonymous or Carrot Top.

What is odd is that despite this being a topic Emmerich apparently feels passionate about, he doesn’t do much to present a case for Oxford being the author of the plays.  Not only is there not much evidence, but many historians and critics have rightly pointed out how the narrative is filled with inaccuracies and how the historical timeline is all mixed up.  Now Emmerich has said that his movie is meant to be like Amadeus which jumped around a bit too but was done for dramatic purposes.  That’s fine I guess and I’ll judge it on those merits too, but it seems odd he doesn’t seem to care at all about facts in a case over a scholarly subject he seems to care about.  In the end it seems like every other conspiracy theory BS you dismiss out of hand.

So let me instead look at this movie as simply a dramatic movie and judge it as such.  Anonymous is still overly long and confusing and as an attempt at an Amadeus-ish type of movie it fails in that regard too.  In Amadeus, we were fully invested in the character of Salieri.  Salieri is tortured by the fact he gives up everything for his passion and some punk kid can fart out masterpieces on the fly.  There is a little bit of that in Anonymous with Oxford and local playwright Ben Jonson, however it doesn’t even have a fraction of the same impact.  Too little time is invested in the relationship and it ends up with scene after scene of Jonson pretty much pouting in the corner.

A good portion of the movie is about royal politicking and the movie really lost me there.  We get subplots about Oxford’s illegitimate son making a play for the throne, we get Robert Cecil doing his Grima Wormtongue impression with the Queen, and we get a strange romance subplot with Oxford and the Queen.The reason why I say it lost me is because I don’t feel this ever gels with the other plot thread of Oxford writing his plays.  Yes I understand the plays were considered seditious and part of the scholarly argument is that Oxford was making social commentary in secret from his plays.  However none of this really amounts to anything storywise.  Oxford published all his plays and there were no power shifts, there were no regime changes, there were no sweeping reforms.  In the end Cecil is still in power and things go on with no huge historical change.  While Shakespeare’s writings are some of the best stories ever written, they didn’t change anything politically as much as the movie would like to say.  That’s why I wish Emmerich would have copied a bit more from Amadeus and decided to make this a more intimate portrait of two characters.  This would have been much more interesting if you decided to really delve into the stories of two men; one man who is a genius but has to live in anonymity, and another who is dedicated but is unappreciated in his own work while getting undeserved credit for another’s work.  If you just focused on that, it would have worked out a whole lot better.

Anonymous fails because it wants to have it both ways and fails in both regards.  It wants to be historical and present a case for Oxford but it sacrifices its credibility by messing up the facts for the purposes of the dramatic story.  As a dramatic work it fails because the personal drama is lost in a mess of plot threads and uninteresting royal politicking.  The characters are flat and the acting is bad with the absolute worst being David Thewlis in a brief role.  It is downright embarassing how awful he is in this movie.  The worst thing is this movie felt way too long.  I was well done with this movie at the 90 minute mark and let out a scream of agony that I had another 40 minutes to go.  This was a dull mess and I can’t see myself recommending this movie to anyone.