Shakespeare-as-fraud is one of the more popular conspiracy theories out there, but please, for the love of God, don't go into Roland Emmerich's Anonymous expecting some kind of enlightenment or, worse, concrete evidence that the naysayers speak truth. Historical value is about the last thing on this movie's mind; it's a lavish, sporadically entertaining soap opera that's remarkable more for its set design than anything else. The movie captures a genuinely stuffy, grimy feel; gone is the glossy romanticism of something like Shakespeare In Love and in its place is a dark, dimly lit U.K. where the slums are squeamishly vibrant and the palace halls are drearily still. The message here, it seems, is that the street urchins tend to have all the fun.
Alas, though, there's two hours of this movie to get through, and apart from that wonderful production design, the rest of it is awfully hit-or-miss. The actors push far and away too hard in their roles; by the time a young Queen Elizabeth I (Joely Richardson) screeches "I LOVE HIM!!!!" in another character's face, it's clear that the movie -- as is Emmerich's wont, since he's the thinking man's Michael Bay -- has more or less checked any pretensions of subtlety at the door (Anonymous's clever framing device actually does provide a reasonable context for some of its hammier moments, but still). The movie, though admirably ambitious, is also too long by about a half an hour. Its plot is a huge, ungainly thing that jumps back and forth through time (including brief excursions into the present day), breaches the fourth wall, and attempts to combine historical drama and sweeping, forbidden romance set against a tale of political intrigue and deceit.
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of story Shakespeare himself might have written. Or, as Anonymous might say, a story the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) might have written. A preening nobleman who, burdened with a forced, loveless marriage and a scheming father-in-law, Robert Cecil (David Thewlis), Oxford finds his true catharsis in the written word. Despite being stuffed into a giant ruffled collar and burdened with a Disney villain's mustache, Ifans brings a handsome soulfulness to the world-weary Oxford; he takes the material just seriously enough that we can still believe it. His understatement gives way towards the end, when the twists and turns reach a fever pitch and he turns into a glorious ham, but his performance is the most immediately likeable thing about Anonymous (Jaime Campbell Bower from Sweeney Todd is on hand in flashback as a younger Oxford, and while he makes for a dashing presence onscreen, he's mostly around as a framing device and his performance is given far less attention than Ifans's).
Eventually, Oxford recruits a struggling Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) to stage his plays under an anonymous name, and this is where Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) shows up, as an oily, goonish type who publicly claims himself the author of Oxford's plays. Spall, a semi-unknown and son of Timothy, does a nice job turning the public perception of Shakespeare on its head; his Bard is one of the more vile characters to appear onscreen in recent memory, but the character is cripplingly one-note, and so the movie relegates him to little more than a plot device who stirs up trouble while more interesting goings-on rage around him. He has his big moment early on, and for the rest of the movie nothing he does is truly of any consequence; he may as well have exited stage left right then and there.
Admittedly, in its earlier stages, Anonymous is fun in kind of a goofy way. The sight of English actors squeezed into foppish costumes and acting like noblemen (or women; big props to Vanessa Redgrave as the elder Elizabeth) is one of the more tried-and-true pleasures of the movies, and Emmerich holds us at attention as we meet the various characters who populate his world. But as the movie goes on -- and on, and on, and on -- the charm gradually wears off, Emmerich's hand grows noticeably heavier, and we're left to just wait as the movie trudges, with sound and fury, towards where we already know it's inevitably going.
But in the meantime, there is one actor who commands attention throughout: Edward Hogg, another new-ish face, slithers onto the scene as Cecil's hunchbacked son and, propelled by a late-game monologue, snatches the movie right out from under the face of far more ballyhooed actors than he. If Ifans's performance is the most immediately enjoyable, Hogg's is the one you'll remember best leaving the theater. His performance is exactly the right tone for a movie like this, because he seems to truly get what Emmerich is going for: he's a ham but not ostentatiously so, a cartoon but not cripplingly so, and sympathetic but not overwhelmingly so. He takes Anonymous for what it is: a beautiful bit of BS and, if you let it, a half-decent way to spend two hours. And by the way, Hogg looks like he's having the best time out of anyone in the movie, and probably the audience, too. When you're in on the joke, he seems to be saying, you really have all the fun.
