Anonymous -

[Guest]

I saw Anonymous this afternoon and whilst it's very much a Hollywood melodrama, it's creditable and touching. It honours London visually and likewise is fair to most of the people it depicts (in fact, everyone except Shakespeare and Marlowe). The script's ok but the dialogue needed to be better and the occasional cod Elizabethanisms should have been cut.

However, Vanessa Redgrave is really startling as Elizabeth playing with a sort of geriatric girlishness a cross between Titaniia and Miss Haversham. It's really a very moving performance, particularly as the story spins its twist near the end. Mark Rylance appears in a pair of beautiful cameos playing Richard III and Henry V. Rhys Evans is as good as he can be in a part that's not really quite well-enough written and Ben Johnson's sold short in every regard. But, it's a great story, pretty well-told on a grand scale with alot of energy, pathos and several very good jokes. I'd feared the auditorium might be full of schoolkids on half-term break but they were mostly older people and quite a contingent of literary types who had a lot of fun with the depiction of Shakespeare as a self-serving, only semi-literate cadge.

Not quite what it might have been but good fun.

[Simon]

I saw Anonymous this afternoon and whilst it's very much a Hollywood melodrama, it's creditable and touching. It honours London visually and likewise is fair to most of the people it depicts (in fact, everyone except Shakespeare and Marlowe). The script's ok but the dialogue needed to be better and the occasional cod Elizabethanisms should have been cut.

However, Vanessa Redgrave is really startling as Elizabeth playing with a sort of geriatric girlishness a cross between Titaniia and Miss Haversham. It's really a very moving performance, particularly as the story spins its twist near the end. Mark Rylance appears in a pair of beautiful cameos playing Richard III and Henry V. Rhys Evans is as good as he can be in a part that's not really quite well-enough written and Ben Johnson's sold short in every regard. But, it's a great story, pretty well-told on a grand scale with alot of energy, pathos and several very good jokes. I'd feared the auditorium might be full of schoolkids on half-term break but they were mostly older people and quite a contingent of literary types who had a lot of fun with the depiction of Shakespeare as a self-serving, only semi-literate cadge.

Not quite what it might have been but good fun.

Might be creditable in some ways, but it's hardly credible, from the review I read. Not being "fair" to Will is hardly a minor point: after all, the thing is centred on him! Nor was it, from what I've read, fair to QEI.

I've no objection to mocking history - doesn't everyone love Blackadder? - but blatantly to promote false ideas as even semi-justified is wrong-headed for me. But that's some of the chips on the shoulders in Hollywood for you - they've also depicted the English during the AWoI as Commie/Nazi-type thugs who herded women and children into a building and burnt them alive.

[hackneyvi]

Might be creditable in some ways, but it's hardly credible, from the review I read. Not being "fair" to Will is hardly a minor point: after all, the thing is centred on him! Nor was it, from what I've read, fair to QEI.

I've no objection to mocking history - doesn't everyone love Blackadder? - but blatantly to promote false ideas as even semi-justified is wrong-headed for me. But that's some of the chips on the shoulders in Hollywood for you - they've also depicted the English during the AWoI as Commie/Nazi-type thugs who herded women and children into a building and burnt them alive.

This is made by the man who directed a Mel Gibson film called The Patriot and it does have a strange socio-political point to make. It explicitly says that a man who was the son of an illiterate labourer and finished up as a merchant couldn't (and wouldn't) have written these plays. It is distinctly a film about class.

But it isn't centred on Shakespeare. It centres on Johnson and the Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare is nothing more than an opportunistic go-between who makes the most of the opportunity he's been given. Her is though played with the sort of Little Britain-ish inanity of David Walliams.

The Blackadder parallels aren't unfair. Johnson, Shakespeare and Marlowe are respectively the Blackadder, Tony Robinson/Hugh Laurie and the Captain Darling. It's a melodramatic farce with a tragic ending and quite an effective film despite its shortcomings.

[Simon]

Interesting! Thanks Phil. Now you've made me want to watch it, though I don't feel inclined to give my cash to such projects. These moral dilemmas...!

[hackneyvi]

Interesting! Thanks Phil. Now you've made me want to watch it, though I don't feel inclined to give my cash to such projects. These moral dilemmas...!

I can understand your position, Simon. It's a long way short of first rate but there's a good, juicy plot which is no more implausible or inconsistent than Shakespeare's own plays and in that regard, I suppose, Anonymous cheeks The Bard by playing him at his own game. I had the impression that the people laughing most were the more knowledgable because of the edge of gleeful disbelief in their periodic but fairly loud laughter.

I've seen it being given 3 (out of 5) stars almost everywhere but it really earns them. Its full-hearted and its ideas are close enough to great that it's possible to see an overpainted masterpeice 'behind' it. It's a pity that it is just a 3 star film but I took quite alot of pleasure from it that I hadn't foreseen finding.

[Pabmusic]

This is made by the man who directed a Mel Gibson film called The Patriot and it does have a strange socio-political point to make. It explicitly says that a man who was the son of an illiterate labourer and finished up as a merchant couldn't (and wouldn't) have written these plays. It is distinctly a film about class.

Quite right. This neatly sums up the case for the supporters of Oxford, for the film's premise is not new: "He couldn't've written them 'cos he's a grammar-school oik". Never mind that Oxford died in 1604; he wrote the 13 later plays as well, and just left them to be performed in his absence until 1613.

It's an ideal plot for the director of The Patriot, of course. And this time he didn't even have to transfer a nazi massacre from 1940s France to 1770s America and blame it on the British!

[Chris Newman]

I shall eventually see this film. I imagine that it is like Amadeus, one of those rather fanciful but good fun and dramatic stories based on smidgeons of evidence. Somewhere in my attic i have a volume of what is called Christopher Marlowe's Sonnets. They look awfully familiar. They were printed by the Christopher Marlowe Society in the Nineteen Twenties. The story is not very new.

[Stunsworth]

I've no objection to mocking history - doesn't everyone love Blackadder? - but blatantly to promote false ideas as even semi-justified is wrong-headed for me

I've not seen the film, but it's a drama not a documentary. I suspect most bio-pics present a distorted view of history.

[Nick Armstrong]

blatantly to promote false ideas as even semi-justified is wrong-headed for me

No doubt the real Macbeth, Richard III et al. would have agreed with you Simon. Wrong-headed bugger, that Shakespeare...

[hackneyvi]

I shall eventually see this film. I imagine that it is like Amadeus, one of those rather fanciful but good fun and dramatic stories based on smidgeons of evidence.

I have a recollection that Amadeus' dialogue was better than this but the comparison is about right, CN. It's a well-turned turd.