658 – Anonymous (**1/2)

It’s long been posited that the man we know as William Shakespeare did not, in fact, write any of the many plays and sonnets for which he is still known 400 years later. Anonymous‘s premise is that it was the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere, who penned the classics and used, indirectly, Shakespeare as a front for the performance of his work. But even if you buy that premise – and it is not essential that you do – the movie is overplotted, dark, and dreary, but with terrific performances by Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, and others.

It seems Edward has all of these plays that he’s been writing, to his wife’s consternation, and he wants to see them performed. But plays are not held in high esteem in London in the late 1500s; to avoid sullying his family name, the Earl provides a local playwright named Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto), of whom the more learned of you may have heard. Jonson has his own troupe perform one of the plays, the audience goes crazy, loves it, and so all is good. Except when young Jonson is arrested for sedition, because of course anything that makes the nobility look bad is by definition seditious. And so it goes.

All right, so there’s conflict. Class versus class. The place of poetry and of creativity in general in society. Did I mention the French also have designs on the throne of Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) as well? Oh yes, it’s one of those movies. Everyone seems to be angling for something, sort of the norm for costume period dramas. I like that, to a point. Intrigue is good. And this is also one of those movies in which everyone seems to be sleeping with someone they shouldn’t be, or at least knows about someone in that position, which leads to blackmail, which represents the plot of every British period drama ever, basically.

Overall, the acting is fine, particularly by Ifans and Redgrave (but of course). Most of the rest of the cast, although competent, is dispensable, even the character of Shakespeare himself. Jonson’s more interesting, and Armesto is sufficient, but he’s no Sir John Mills. Or Sir Paul McCartney, really, but he tries. There’s no hamminess, which is nice, but the passion is relegated to the leads and the leads alone.

Some caveats. For one thing, although London of the period is basically a muddy city, I don’t recall seeing anyone with a speck of dirt on them. Ok, sure, the nobility gets to walk on half-foot-wide planks to avoid the mud, but still. No mud? Seriously? And no one has a hair out of place, even under the rotten, unsanitary conditions. Also: way too many characters. Picture this: It’s dark, it’s gloomy, it’s dirty, and all of the men look the same. Someone would rush into a scene, breathlessly importing news of, well, import, and everyone in the scene would instantly recognize him. And I’d be like, “Have we met?” I couldn’t keep track of them all.

And it wasn’t just the characters. There are too many plots. Who wrote the plays? That would have been a nice plot to stick with, and instead of giving us the answer in the first ten minutes, leave it as a – stay with me, now – twist at the end. Then you don’t get bogged down with endless prattling about the queen doing this and the earls doing that and ships and swords and why are there guns when other people have swords and on and on.

Well, you get what you pay for, sort of. The sly ones look sly, the foppish ones look foppish, the witty ones try to be witty, and the queen wears the weirdest makeup in the history of painted faces. In this case, the movie’s the thing, wherein we don’t even see a king. That’s a bad play on words. Let me try again. This movie shouldn’t have stopped at being titled “Anonymous”; it should have been written by Anonymous as well. I’m making it out to be worse than it probably is, because period pieces aren’t my bag (unless they’re Dangerous Liasions), so for the sake of fairness I am adding a half star to the review.

Anonymous: **1/2