Always on Sunday: Anonymous

Sunday's regular movie review.

The wondrous words of the writings attributed to William Shakespeare are the hero of the 2011 speculative-historical movie Anonymous. Scenes from eight or ten of Shakespeare's plays are portrayed, either in a royal court setting with the young (Joely Richardson) or old Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave, Joely's mother) in the audience, or on the public stage with their rowdies and a handful of envious younger writers (Ben Jonson [Sebastian Armesto], Christopher Marlowe [Trystan Gravelle], Thomas Nashe [Tony Way], Thomas Dekker [Robert Emms]) wishing they could write like that.

Anonymous (2011: Roland Emmerich) [A costume drama set in the period roughly 1575-1605 resting on a collection of mostly debunked speculations about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays, whether Queen Elizabeth might have had one or two children, one of them by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), and whether the actor William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) might remotely possibly have himself murdered Christopher Marlowe to prevent him from exposing Shakespeare's willful fraud. Set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I and the rebellion against her by the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid).] VG [IMDB's plot summary

    The VG indicates that I enjoyed the movie and thought it better than just averagely good entertainment. But I can recommend it only for mature audiences capable of keeping their informed disbelief alive while possibly enjoying an Oliver Stone, JFK-type of historical fantasy. Fellow movie fan Ken Marks seconds that warning:

Snow White is a fabrication. Anonymous is a speculation. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it's a speculation that virtually no Shakespearean scholar takes seriously. Yet Hollywood has the temerity to offer the public supposed historical revelations! Will the multitudes who see it come away thinking, What a fanciful presentation? Not a chance. Their reaction will be, Well, well—for how many centuries have we been in the dark?

A few things I really liked about Anonymous:
    Vanessa Redgrave's utterly convincing impersonation of a doddering elderly woman (whether or not the historical Elizabeth doddered).

    Rhys Ifans's nuanced performance as Edward de Vere, the film's dashing, sensitive lover of a queen, father of one of her sons, skilled swordsman, and the actual genius who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare (however speculative these conceits may be—except perhaps for the swordsmanship).
    The rapt faces of the younger writers in the theater as they listen to language they can't believe the inarticulate, barely schooled actor William Shakespeare could possibly have penned (however much of a Mozartian genius the actual Shakespeare is generally believed to have been).