Anonymous | Film review

Sony Pictures has come under fire from scholars for distributing lesson plans to schools, an attempt to bolster the Shakespeare-authorship conspiracy theory proffered by Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous. Of course, we all believed everything in our 10,000 B.C. info packets. While the propaganda is worrisome, the director also responsible for the global-warming science of The Day After Tomorrow has given Earl of Oxfordians a movie as overheated as the controversy calls for. Anonymous gets tempers roiling almost immediately, with Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) being tortured to reveal the author behind all those fantastic plays. Its time-leaping yarn comes to encompass political intrigue, generation-spanning love, a parallel conspiracy theory involving Elizabeth’s bastard children and, almost incidentally, incest. The author of Titus Andronicus would be pleased.

When is the last time an aspiring blockbuster viewed literature as a subject worthy of bloodshed? We know as much about Shakespeare as we do any figure from Elizabethan England, so it’s worth regarding Anonymous with the skepticism one accords to, say, Oliver Stone’s JFK. Better to appreciate it as an old-fashioned swashbuckler, a film that might have passed muster as a campy Hollywood B movie of yore. (“My God, you’re…writing again!” Oxford’s wife exclaims. It’s a worthy successor to the moment in Anthony Mann’s great French Revolution noir, Reign of Terror, when Richard Basehart’s piqued Robespierre shouts, “Don’t call me Max!”) Emmerich’s film gains gravitas from Rhys Ifans as Oxford, a man wounded by the knowledge that his work will outlive him. The play’s the thing, and Anonymous isn’t exactly Shakespeare.