Big Screen Peter: Anonymous

Editor’s note: Posting of this movie review was delayed through no fault of the author. Anonymous is not now playing in the Fort Smith region.

review by Peter Lewis

“Anonymous,” a new movie directed by Roland Emmerich, rests upon a simple, albeit hazardous conceit. What if Shakespeare wasn’t the author of all the words we associate with him? What if he was simply a pawn in a much larger game?

To explore such notions is to descend a rabbit-hole. For who, if not Shakespeare, was the pen behind the words? The 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. The theory, while widely panned by virtually all Elizabethan & Shakespearean scholars, has been a consistent voice among the Shakespeare naysayers for the past century.

It’s a tantalizing thread to pull. The possibilities for narrative exploitation are virtually limitless.

And in a way, Emmerich gives a successful tug on that thread. The Elizabethan world jumps off the screen, immersing audiences in the sights and sounds of that disappeared London life. Further, the thought that Shakespeare was not a master, but an unwitting chess piece in a high-risk game of 17th century geopolitics is, no matter how preposterous, a rather exciting gambit. It’s the Da Vinci Code mindset transposed onto the supposed mystery of the origins of Hamlet, et al.

Though no stranger to convoluting history for the sake of a story (The Patriot), Emmerich handles Anonymous well. In fact, it’s arguably one of his best pictures … though that is faint praise at its finest.

If, as a moviegoer, you are able to suspend your belief in this batty, unfounded concept, you will be rewarded with a fairly well-developed world of intrigue and suspense. This will be harder than it sounds for many. As peppered with the lore of Shakespeare as we are in the English speaking world, stomaching the thought he is a fraud isn’t the easiest thing to swallow, even in a darkened theater with sabers rattling and brief moments of regal fellatio.

Spurious and suspenseful as it may be, “Anonymous” has its share of cinematic faults. As a narrative, it jumps forward and backward in time, stripping the movie of a natural coherency. Certainly, expecting intelligence and attention from an audience isn’t reason enough to fault a movie. However, Emmerich’s use of the time jumps are a superfluous artifice. Further, to believe that such a learned man as de Vere should fail to take the necessary precautions required in his plotting is as absurd as the entire premise of the film.

And this isolated aspect is telling. For “Anonymous” is little more than bloated melodrama, seeking to exploit and expose lesser known elements of an appreciated history for its gain. Sure, it’s fun and exciting. It certainly illustrates some of the capabilities Emmerich has been hiding in piss-poor movies over the years. Hell, it’s even well acted. But “Anonymous” never rises to anything resembling evocative and resonant cinema.

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