That’s definitely not the silliest thing/biggest historical inaccuracy, either.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
To be fair, much of the criticism I’ve seen has focused on the gross historical errors made in the film. If you don’t care about that (and most people aren’t even going to notice), then that’s not going to matter. Just be clear that you’re not seeing a documentary!
[/QUOTE]
But there is a fundamental difference between Anonymous and Shakespeare in Love and that is over the issue of tone. As scriptwriters for the latter, Marc Norman and Sir Tom Stoppard actually went to some trouble to fit their plot around the known facts and yet there is never any sense that we are meant to take the story seriously. That means that when they do introduce errors, one is more inclined to believe that they know they are and to accept this as part of the film’s general playfulness. That is also why historians of the period generally loved Shakespeare in Love. Cleverness that doesn’t take itself seriously is often a winning formula.
In contrast, Anonymous wants to play it straight and so immediately runs into the Dan Brown problem - as soon as a creative artist asserts that their work is saying something important about the actual historical past, the inevitable reaction from us, the audience, is to wonder about the accuracy of such a claim. The artist cannot have it both ways. Such claims, if being made seriously, deserve to be judged by exactly the same standards as anyone else’s claims about the past. In the case of Anonymous, the real problem isn’t that it has Oxford write the plays, but that it shamelessly plays fast and loose with most of the other facts as well. It is almost as if Emmerich and Orloff want to invite ridicule. Dumbness combined with seriousness rarely works.
It also isn’t helped by some of the performances. Jamie Campbell Bower always strikes me as just a pretty face and probably a bit dim. Which could be grossly unfair to him, but this is certainly something of a disadvantage when playing the greatest literary genius of the age. Rhys Ifans, on the other hand, for the first time ever in his career, gives a performance that’s a bit boring. And who would have thought that Vanessa Redgrave would be quite so bad at playing a batty old woman?
But the biggest surprise was the bear-baiting scene. That’s not something you see in many films these days.
OK - so the film finally got to Las Vegas and we went to see it yesterday.
We liked it.
Not for one moment did we think this was a “serious” tome about Shakespeare not really being the author of his works; it was more of a “what if” scenario. They show Shakespeare as a somewhat shifty buffoon con-artist who lucks into some manuscripts and pawns them off as his own. The rest is royal intrigue and backstabbing and the usual evil doings of those in line to become King/Queen.
Great scenery, great costumes, great action scenes and best of all, some really nicely done snippets of Shakespearean plays done on stage at the Globe.
Anyone who envisions masses of people leaving the theater and declaring Shakespeare to be a fraud is wrong. Despite what the director and writer may really think, I believe 99.99% of the audience would consider this movie to be pure fiction. As such, I think it was a good film and worth the price of admission.
I doubt many reading this will be dashing off to a movie theater to see it, but I strongly suggest catching it on DVD or cable when it shows up. I think you will be pleasantly surprised how enjoyable this Elizabethan romp is.
Oh, and remember - it’s fiction, in case you are 12 years old and easily duped.