Roland Emmerich (2012) is good at precisely one thing: Blowing shit up. He’s destroyed the White House twice. He’s subjected New York to aliens, tsunamis and Godzilla. So why, oh why, did he decide to take on a talky period piece about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays?
The human element has always been the weak link in Emmerich’s films. He’s a director who uses the sledgehammer of spectacle to wow the audience into submission; things like dialogue and characterization often get lost beneath the (often literal) tidal waves of computer-generated imagery. He’s a wide-angle filmmaker, so it’s baffling that he would attempt a film that’s driven by personality and politics rather than, you know, explosions.
But Emmerich has always loved characters who uncover a dark truth, only to find that the world just won’t listen. In Anonymous, that truth isn’t about a coming cataclysm (be it by space invaders, global warming or Mayan prophecy), but that Shakespeare was a fraud, a patsy who falsely claimed authorship of the Earl of Oxford’s (Rhys Ifans, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1) anonymously published works.
This is, of course, historical hogwash, and Emmerich doesn’t even bother to get the minor historical details right. He badly mixes up the publication order of the plays; he presents the plays at the Globe Theatre as gaudy spectacles with more pyrotechnics than a Van Halen concert, when in reality they used minimal costuming and set decoration; he purports that Shakespeare (er, Oxford) personally invented the (entirely false) rumor that King Richard III was a hunchback, when in fact the myth came from Sir Thomas More’s wildly inventive history.
And so on.
But the appeal of Emmerich’s movies isn’t their believability, it’s their pure, goofy, stupid, B-movie-writ-large enjoyability — which Anonymous entirely lacks. It’s a self-serious, dour, portentous film with lots of talk about issues of class and royal succession that never develop into anything interesting. It’s a melodrama that believes it’s high tragedy and lacks the campy fun of the former or the profundity of the latter. It is, in short, boring.
There’s an extreme disconnect between John Orloff’s (Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole) script, which believes this is a serious, no-nonsense examination of a grave historical oversight, and Emmerich’s typically ostentatious direction, which includes lots of wide shots of CGI London and pushes the actors to give performances so hammy they should all be banned for life from Kosher delis.
Emmerich’s approach is probably the right one — the film is most entertaining at its most over-the-top, when people are yelling things like “It would be an affront against the Muses!” — but he too often fools himself into believing that he’s making a capital-I Important film. He’s mistaken himself for one of his characters, fearlessly exposing a conspiracy that the world just won’t listen to. Unfortunately for Emmerich, the world is probably right to ignore him.
VERDICT: Anonymous offers nothing you would want from either a period piece or a Roland Emmerich film.
rgifford@umdbk.com
