It was 1991, and I was a dumb kid who knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Or the particulars of our involvement in Southeast Asia, or the Cuban Missile Crisis or who Khrushchev was, or even what it meant to have "leftist affiliations." My teachers tried. Really. But it took flashy cinematography and bathos-laden acting to break through.
So when I saw JFK, I was fascinated, and it wasn't long before I'd incorporated it into my thinking on subjects such as American foreign policy and the military-industrial complex.
Yes, yes. Mea culpa.
Of course, years later, when I finally started connecting dots and thinking on my own (at an embarrassing age, no less), I found out that what Oliver Stone had in cinematic brilliance, he completely lacked in historical accuracy. First I found out that Kennedy increased military involvement in Vietnam, thus negating the government's motive for killing him. Then I found out that Jim Garrison, the district attorney protagonist, contaminated one of the crime scenes, which led me to wonder what else was fishy about his investigation. There was certainly no difficulty in discovering critiques of his book, which I had read as a junior in high school and which was one of the source materials of the film, or of Stone's research techniques, which the Internet made readily available to me and which appalled and chastened me just as much as Gerald Posner's scathing comment that most anyone in Generation X who claimed to know anything about the Kennedy assassination most likely got it from seductive, cinematic historical vomit.
Mea culpa indeed.
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| "If you ignore what Kennedy actually did, my story is totally believable, isn't it?" |
So when I walked out of Roland Emmerich's Anonymous Saturday night, ready to spout a list of facts and figures to anyone who would listen about how the movie was nothing more than a bucket of steaming horse manure, I remembered that dumb kid of 1991. And I shut right up, thinking "It's just a movie. Nobody's passing this off as a graduate thesis."
Except somebody will. I've already had several pointless conversations with the occasional high school student (and any high school student that wants to debate Renaissance historical scholarship and/or Elizabethan literary figures is always welcome in my classroom) about the who-wrote-Shakespeare debacle. I usually try to steer them towards James Shapiro's Contested Will, which seems to me to do to the authorship question what Posner and Vincent Bugliosi did to Kennedy conspiracy theories. Failing that, I always point out that, no matter how you spin it, the only way the question "Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays" has any validity is if we accept the premise that people who lived in the sticks are incapable of writing Great Literature. "Replace 'sticks' with 'suburbs,'" I tell them, "and see if you still think that way."
Some do; some don't. It doesn't matter. As Hamlet said, "The play's the thing." The works are there on the shelf, on the stage, in the occasional cinematic release. No one can take them away from us.
But.
But.
But why oh why did it have to be Emmerich who riffed on the Shakespeare issue? At least Stone turned out an incredible recreation of a piece of our past. One might, and should, get in his face about the facts, but as a work of art, the film is unparalleled in many ways.
Emmerich has done a good movie or two in his past. Okay, one: I will admit to enjoying Independence Day, but I walked right out of The Day After Tomorrow, figuring the day I sit through a movie that makes an Ice Age a monster to be battled and confronted is the Day After They Bury Me in My Shroud. Ditto 2012. That which we call a piece of crap by any other name would smell as badly, and for me, I tapped out of End of the World flicks with The Seventh Sign, thank you very much.
Anonymous, from a script and story by John Orloff, essentially frames the authorship question like this: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) essentially wrote the body of Shakespeare's plays and poems throughout his entire life, though he was constrained from publication in order to spare his family the embarrassment. An accidental murder early in his life enables his benefactor William Cecil (David Thewlis) to maneuver him into marriage with his (Cecil's) daughter. Meanwhile, de Vere has affairs with two other women: a court woman and Queen Elizabeth herself (Vanessa Redgrave for most of the film; Redgrave's daughter Joely Richardson fills in for her to show the young Queen lusting after the Bieberesque earl-in-training, played by Jamie Bower).
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| "My record is going platinum and I've got two more chest hairs. You don't stand a chance." |
Years pass, and de Vere takes on the role of éminence grise to his queen, ordering struggling poet Ben Johnson (Sebastian Armesto) to take authorship of his plays so they can be performed and influence Elizabeth to ditch her weaselly adviser, ensure the right successor to the throne and generally push her towards constructing the kind of England de Vere and a few of his friends wish to see. The only trouble is Johnson rejects the offer, only to see actor and vulgar illiterate Will Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) grab it in a heartbeat, complicating the conspiracy and ensuring ruffled feathers, betrayal and an overall Comedy of Errors that borrows heavily from Sophocles and MTV-flavored reality television alike.
This being Emerich, and this being British history for the ADHD, there are twists and turns I'm not going to get into here. And this being as far from realistic as I can think of, I will merely cite Stephen Marche's piece in the New York Times as a good piece of academic indignation over what the film does to empower conspiracy theorists and quasi-historical debate.
Anonymous has strong points, I will admit. I really liked how it was framed: we see Derek Jacobi speed in a taxi to a New York theater just in time to deliver the prologue introducing the authorship question, at which point the stage transitions into the film proper (though Emerich undoubtedly ripped this off of Branagh's Henry V, with Jacobi playing the exact same role, no less). Action and conspiracy scenes are shot with tight angles and whispered conversations are framed in corners, through lattices and the like. The sets and computer-generated panoramas of vistas like the Globe Theater, the Thames, the Tower of London and even Queen Elizabeth's funeral procession are impressive. But the acting falls flat; history is a dog's breakfast of condensed murder plots, battles, dubious love affairs and authors behaving more like ad execs from Mad Men than the cutthroat yet dedicated poets and playwrights they really were.
Still, considering the hatchet job the movie takes to reality and logic, Anonymous isn't good enough to justify the damage it's sure to do to Shakespeare's contemporary reputation. Ifans is too bland to make his scheming believable, and Redgrave puts too much adolescent angst into her performance to sell Glorianna. It's possible that the film will result in a renewed interest in the authorship question, which will then spur further interest in the works of Shakespeare, which is always a good thing. But it's much more likely that it will create future pains in the ass raising their hands in future Shakespeare seminars asking questions like "Is it true that Shakespeare killed Christopher Marlowe?" or "Why didn't they just get one of Elizabeth's bastards to take over for her after she died?" Just like history teachers to this day are still asked to this day about second gunmen, Kennedy's orders to withdraw from Vietnam and secret CIA umbrella guns. Et tu, Roland?
