Anonymous (2011)

ANONYMOUS  (2011)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Roland Emmerich
    Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Sebastian Armesto
    Rafe Spall, David Thewlis, Jamie Campbell Bower,
    Joely Richardson, Trystan Gravelle, Derek Jacobi
This starts out with Derek Jacobi walking in off the street and onto a theater stage, just as the curtain's about to go up. In a brief monologue delivered straight to the audience, he suggests that the author of Shakespeare's plays might not be Shakespeare after all, and the stage behind him comes to life, opening up into a street scene in Elizabethan England. What follows is a conspiracy tale based on a theory most scholars consider fraudulent, attributing the plays to one Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. According to this account, Edward (Rhys Ifans) can't claim authorship because it's beneath his station, but he can't resist writing the plays and seeing them performed, so he has Ben Jonson deliver them to the theater anonymously. When the plays take off and audiences demand to know who wrote them, a self-promoting buffoon named Shakespeare steals the chance to claim credit and becomes the earl's unlikely and unwelcome front. At the same time, Edward's involved in some high-level intrigue over who will succeed Queen Elizabeth (an impressively aging Vanessa Redgrave), with whom he once had a passionate affair that produced an illegitimate son. So you can see there's a lot going on here, with plenty of potential for high comedy (think "Shakespeare In Love" and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead") and just as much potential for high drama (think the Cate Blanchett "Elizabeth" movies). Unfortunately, Roland Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff can't seem to get a handle on either, much less find the balance between them. The result is a movie that looks and sounds good enough, but takes its dubious premise a little too seriously. It should be a lot more fun. What matters, as Jacobi points out at the end, isn't who wrote the plays. It's that we've still got them. Believe any suspect theory you like, we've still got the words.