Anonymous

The opening credits announce "a film by Roland Emmerich."

The movie hasn't even started, and already we're in trouble.

Emmerich is the arch-fiend behind such atrocities as Independence Day (many like that movie, but they are criminally insane), The Patriot (worst historical drama ever?), Godzilla and 10,000 B.C.

Emmerich is every bit as bad a filmmaker as Michael Bay, but somehow he avoids the scathing reputation Bay is saddled with. I don't know why.

Anonymous would probably hurt his reputation, if anyone were to see it. But that's unlikely. It was originally slated for a wide release, but once distributor Sony saw the finished movie and spit their coffee all over the theater floor, they quickly scaled back its debut to 250 theaters, with the idea of expanding that number if, by some miracle of God, the movie found traction with critics and/or audiences.

But God was not in a miracle kind of mood. The movie, which cost $30m just to make, let alone market, has grossed less than $5m in its first two weeks.

That makes it a big enough flop to have gotten Emmerich's next project, a massive sci-fi movie called Singularity, put into turnaround.

I bet Emmerich wishes he'd never even heard of the Shakespeare authorship question.

Said question has been bouncing around academic circles for at least a hundred years. It rises from two principal facts. You'll notice both are a little slippery.

Fact One: We don't have any solid evidence Shakespeare did write the plays. The surviving copies are all in someone else's hand. In fact, the only penmanship we have from Shakespeare comes from his will, in which he spells his name three different ways, apparently by accident. Hmmm.

Fact Two: Whoever did write the plays seems to be well-read, well-traveled, comfortable in several languages, and possessed of a keen insight into the psychology of the nobility. All qualities hard to imagine existing in the elementary school dropout and wannabe actor named William Shakespeare.

And that's pretty much it.

However, there's another strongly compelling reason to doubt Shakespeare's true identity, and that reason is: it's fun to doubt Shakespeare's identity. It's fun to debate the evidence, it's fun to speculate about who might have really written the plays, and it's fun to watch certain Shakespeare-loving geeks turn bright red when you say, "There's no way some average schmoe like Shakespeare could have written those plays. Impossible."

Boy, does that drive them crazy.

So Emmerich got pulled into the Shakespeare authorship question because it seemed like a good time, but then he had a very bad thought. Why, he thought, hasn't this idea been turned into a movie?

Uh...

So here's the movie he came up with.

The real author of the plays is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and clandestine lover of Queen Elizabeth. As a youth, de Vere gets separated from his true love by a scheming courtier who wants de Vere to go back to his wife, who happens to be the scheming courtier's daughter.

That's one half of the movie. (We jump back and forth.) It happens when de Vere is in his twenties. The other half takes place when de Vere is in his sixties. It concerns de Vere's attempts to -- okay, brace yourself here -- warn Elizabeth of a palace coup being fomented by the son of the original scheming courtier. The way he does this is by writing genius-level plays and filling them with secret codes that will get Elizabeth's subconscious mind spinning until she realizes her life and crown are in imminent danger.

I know, I know, you've got a million questions, starting with: "Wait a second, why not just TELL Elizabeth her closest advisor is plotting against her? Why go to the trouble of writing the cornerstone of the western literary canon?" There's no convincing answer to this question, nor to all the others that spring up, and get roughly trampled, throughout.

Part of the problem is that we are subjected to a massive array of characters, events, locales and subplots, as often happens when writers have to do historical research. This lack of focus is magnified by the chronological back-and-forth, whose confusion is absurdly amplified by the fact that young Edward de Vere looks nothing like old Edward de Vere.

Thus, a misconceived premise, haphazard structure, unrealized characters, a phony setting, embarrassingly stilted dialogue, and one of the most insultingly shallow lines ever uttered about art, by the man who theoretically wrote Shakespeare's plays -- "All art is political," he says, "otherwise it would be mere decoration" -- which is so offensively off-base I don't want to get into it or I'll start turning bright red myself -- as a result of all this, it's easy to think Emmerich maybe shouldn't have made a movie about Shakespeare at all.

But he did. His name's right there on the credits.

Though he probably wishes it weren't.

That authorship thing cuts both ways.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 18/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 17/100