Anonymous

It's too bad that Roland Emmerich made ANONYMOUS. But it's also a great joy that he made it. Emmerich, the director to schlocky, idiotic, coherent dialogue sparse films like GODZILLA, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, INDEPENDENCE DAY and 2012, would never have been expected in a million years to make a film about the Oxfordian Theory, but he did. This, I think, (his track record especially), has caused ANONYMOUS to be ridiculously and unfairly nit-picked, and even dismissed by many critics. That's a shame, for if Emmerich's name, and the allegory he places within the film that invigorates his worth were absent, ANONYMOUS would be revered across the board. Sure it's overcomplicated, and its been described even as muddled, but it adds to the fun. Emmerich crafts an extreme-version of the Elizabethan days perhaps because of the exaggerated nature of his disaster films. The film makes the case for (or entertains us with the idea that) William Shakespeare never actually wrote any of the plays attributed to him. Rather, the plays, poems, sonnets, were all the work of a nobleman named Edward de Veer. de Veer, the film exhibits, was a genius, and he is played as such in an Oscar worthy performance by Rhys Ifans. (Again, it's too bad such a performance will be overlooked because the film is made by Emmerich). Skipping around through his timeline with little to assist us but aging hair and a few different actors, Emmerich shows us a labyrinthian world. For ANONYMOUS is, in fact, so complicated and fun, ridiculous and overwrought, that it's affecting. de Veer is brilliant and captivating, and the political trials are so burdened with melodrama that it becomes fun rather than instructive or argumentative. I have one quibble though: would the works of Shakespeare really be so easily explained through the trivialities of de Veer in any grand scale? Of course not, and that's why the Oxfordian Theory is really, really stupid. But who cares, it makes for a pretty great movie: one of my favorites of the year in its unintentional pleasures, and its pure fun with words. Cronenberg once said that he didn't even see the difference between action in the form of violence and action in the form of talking. This is a film that embraces that idea.
Anonymous: ★★★1/2