men who have forgotten how to shit
So I just got back from an NT Live screening of Simon Russell Beale's harrowing, thought-provoking Timon of Athens, on which I will, before too long, have a lot to say. This is not, however, that post. Because last night I joined a group of fellow masochists in a group hate-watching of Anonymous, Roland Emmerich's feculent anti-Shakespearean polemic potboiler, and I need to clear my brain of it by excoriating it on the internet.
At the turning point of Timon of Athens, the title character, faced with mounting debt and friends unwilling to repay his generosity in his time of need, throws his creditors a lavishly presented banquet, only to reveal that the attractive-looking dishes are really (in this production, though not, strictly speaking, in the original text) plates of shit. Which Timon then proceeds to smear in the face of the nearest dinner guest. It's an absolutely perfect metaphor for the experience of watching Anonymous.
Since the movie is over a year old at this point, I'm not going to spend an enormously long time cataloguing its numerous flaws -- cleverer and funnier people than I have done so at great length -- or its one good point, i.e. the actually well-done CG recreation of Elizabethan London, which deserved a much better movie in front of it (although all the interiors were dark and blah) and certainly wasn't enough to make the movie at all worth watching. Go look at stills on the internet if you want to see how it looked. Nor do I need to point out the numerous historical errors -- even setting aside the nonsensical nature of the film's central conceit, that the works of Shakespeare were really written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford -- or that many points in the film's argument for de Vere are based on SHIT THEY MADE UP (e.g. the nature of his marriage to Anne Cecil, which was his idea and not William Cecil Lord Burghley's, or which Cecil was doing what at which time, or the fact that the Cecils WEREN'T PURITANS which was a major plot point, or the play performed in support of the Earl of Essex -- the movie shows it as a gesture of support rather than a paid commission -- was Richard II in real life* and not Richard III). You can also read the other reviews for descriptions how boring the movie is, full of grimdark scenes of indistinguishable men attempting to look portentous, or Oxford (played as a boring smug douchebag by Rhys Ifans and Jamie Campbell Bower and some kid whose name I don't know) sitting in a theater box weeping over HIS OWN WORDS, and how incomprehensible it is, jumping back and forth between timestreams at random with basically no transitions, and the ridiculousness of its premise (not only that Oxford was Shakespeare and Shakespeare an illiterate crowd-surfing frontman, but also that the reason Oxford's identity had to be concealed was because he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and Southampton was his illegitimate son by Queen Elizabeth and that this somehow made them both potential heirs to the throne, because royal succession totally works that way).
Instead, I'll expound briefly on the aspects of the film that pissed me off the most.
1. I expected to be really irritated by the movie's depiction of William Shakespeare as a semi-literate (the film depicts him as able to read but not write), inarticulate (because all writers are totally eloquent when unscripted), fame-grubbing, Marlowe-stabbing (seriously!) rake, but actually it bothered me a lot less than I expected because Rafe Spall was the only person in the whole film who didn't look chronically constipated, and thus the bits featuring him were less painful to watch than any other bits. No, what really infuriated me was the depiction of Queen Elizabeth by mother-daughter team Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson (which is a little unnerving given the film's incestuous themes). Redgrave and Richardson both look the part admirably, but Elizabeth (the only important female character in the film; Anne Cecil is mostly a plot device and occasional buzzkill) is written and played as senile (at least, when Redgrave's doing the part), irrational, horny, and generally incompetent. Older Elizabeth goes all twittery over Venus and Adonis, presented in the film as a new work by Oxford to win her over (WITH PORN). Young Elizabeth pants disturbingly over little!Oxford's performance as Puck (in a play he supposedly wrote as a small boy, forty years before it was actually written and about fifteen years before blank-verse drama was invented). Slightly older but still young Elizabeth engages in hopelessly unsexy incestuous sex with Oxford, moons over his juvenile performance as Puck afterwards, and then screams at him when he talks about fighting for her in the Netherlands until he wins her back (and gets a blowjob in the bargain) with a flat recitation of "O Mistress Mine." Then when she learns she's knocked up she insists to Cecil that she wants to marry Oxford and has another screaming hissy fit when he refuses and insists on the importance of her ability to string continental princes along. Also half of the English nobility appears to consist of her illegitimate offspring, which she apparently has time to have before farming them out to noble families who raise them as their own heirs. Because succession totally works that way. Anyway, it is a deeply offensive performance in all ways, and contributed greatly to the rage headache I had afterwards.
2. Another portrayal I really hated -- and I've mentioned this before, I think, but the film lived down to my expectations -- was that of Ben Jonson (played uninterestingly by Sebastian Armesto). The film's Jonson is a not-very-competent aspirer, declining Oxford's offer to let him put his name to the plays on the grounds that they don't sound like his voice. Oxford replies "You have no voice! That's why I chose you!" Which. FUCK YOU, MOVIE. I can't think of an early modern playwright with MORE of a voice than Ben Jonson, whose personality is so clearly manifested in his works -- which we know because he talked about himself ALL THE TIME. (And, as a side note, he was also an inveterate gossip, and yet somehow we're expected to believe he'd talk to Drummond of Hawthornden about Queen Elizabeth's gynecological problems -- seriously, that is in there -- and Shakespeare's lack of "art" but not his BIG HUGE SECRET?) Anyway he ends up being WON OVER by Oxford's BEAUTIFUL WORDS and is charged with preserving the plays for posterity, risking torture to do so. Also nobody else is depicted as having written anything worthwhile in the entire Elizabethan period. There's a group of indistinguishable early modern playwrights who watch Oxford's plays, rag on The Shoemaker's Holiday for no reason, engage in gay panic jokes, and, in the case of undead Christopher Marlowe, fink Shakespeare out to "the Tower" before getting killed by Shakespeare for his trouble. Bah. You can also go here to read Jonson biographer Ian Donaldson's commentary on the movie.
3. Finally, I regret to say that this movie may have ruined Derek Jacobi for me. There is apparently a huge gulf between knowing someone is Stupid About Authorship and actually watching him get all up in our faces onscreen about it. (Mark Rylance is in this movie too, but he is madder than several boxes of frogs, and also all of his dialogue is actual lines from Shakespeare. We get to hear him recite most of the opening speech to Richard III -- which is in the universe of the movie written in 1601 specifically to make fun of Robert Cecil, who actually was a bit hunchbacked, and who wasn't a really prominent figure at court when the play was ACTUALLY WRITTEN circa 1592; another fun message of this movie is that people with disabilities are EEEEVIL -- but he is pelted offstage with vegetables before he can finish, because the people just hate Cecil THAT MUCH. Anyway, his relative lack of pontification means he's less tarnished by the movie in my eyes.) And it makes me really sad, because I love his acting! But I'm not sure I'll ever be able to watch, say, his superb Richard II again without hearing him sneeringly declaiming the "Soul of the age" bit from Jonson's dedicatory Folio verse, the words dripping with classist disgust (despite that Jacobi is himself the son of a tobacconist, and is himself a knight, although the film mocks Shakespeare for buying a coat of arms) and that is pretty heartbreaking. Fuck you, Sir Derek, and fuck you, movie, for destroying something I loved.
*I know there's some debate about the identity of the play in question, although I think it's most likely that it was Shakespeare's Richard II, but it was unquestionably a play about Richard II and not Richard III.
At the turning point of Timon of Athens, the title character, faced with mounting debt and friends unwilling to repay his generosity in his time of need, throws his creditors a lavishly presented banquet, only to reveal that the attractive-looking dishes are really (in this production, though not, strictly speaking, in the original text) plates of shit. Which Timon then proceeds to smear in the face of the nearest dinner guest. It's an absolutely perfect metaphor for the experience of watching Anonymous.
Since the movie is over a year old at this point, I'm not going to spend an enormously long time cataloguing its numerous flaws -- cleverer and funnier people than I have done so at great length -- or its one good point, i.e. the actually well-done CG recreation of Elizabethan London, which deserved a much better movie in front of it (although all the interiors were dark and blah) and certainly wasn't enough to make the movie at all worth watching. Go look at stills on the internet if you want to see how it looked. Nor do I need to point out the numerous historical errors -- even setting aside the nonsensical nature of the film's central conceit, that the works of Shakespeare were really written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford -- or that many points in the film's argument for de Vere are based on SHIT THEY MADE UP (e.g. the nature of his marriage to Anne Cecil, which was his idea and not William Cecil Lord Burghley's, or which Cecil was doing what at which time, or the fact that the Cecils WEREN'T PURITANS which was a major plot point, or the play performed in support of the Earl of Essex -- the movie shows it as a gesture of support rather than a paid commission -- was Richard II in real life* and not Richard III). You can also read the other reviews for descriptions how boring the movie is, full of grimdark scenes of indistinguishable men attempting to look portentous, or Oxford (played as a boring smug douchebag by Rhys Ifans and Jamie Campbell Bower and some kid whose name I don't know) sitting in a theater box weeping over HIS OWN WORDS, and how incomprehensible it is, jumping back and forth between timestreams at random with basically no transitions, and the ridiculousness of its premise (not only that Oxford was Shakespeare and Shakespeare an illiterate crowd-surfing frontman, but also that the reason Oxford's identity had to be concealed was because he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and Southampton was his illegitimate son by Queen Elizabeth and that this somehow made them both potential heirs to the throne, because royal succession totally works that way).
Instead, I'll expound briefly on the aspects of the film that pissed me off the most.
1. I expected to be really irritated by the movie's depiction of William Shakespeare as a semi-literate (the film depicts him as able to read but not write), inarticulate (because all writers are totally eloquent when unscripted), fame-grubbing, Marlowe-stabbing (seriously!) rake, but actually it bothered me a lot less than I expected because Rafe Spall was the only person in the whole film who didn't look chronically constipated, and thus the bits featuring him were less painful to watch than any other bits. No, what really infuriated me was the depiction of Queen Elizabeth by mother-daughter team Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson (which is a little unnerving given the film's incestuous themes). Redgrave and Richardson both look the part admirably, but Elizabeth (the only important female character in the film; Anne Cecil is mostly a plot device and occasional buzzkill) is written and played as senile (at least, when Redgrave's doing the part), irrational, horny, and generally incompetent. Older Elizabeth goes all twittery over Venus and Adonis, presented in the film as a new work by Oxford to win her over (WITH PORN). Young Elizabeth pants disturbingly over little!Oxford's performance as Puck (in a play he supposedly wrote as a small boy, forty years before it was actually written and about fifteen years before blank-verse drama was invented). Slightly older but still young Elizabeth engages in hopelessly unsexy incestuous sex with Oxford, moons over his juvenile performance as Puck afterwards, and then screams at him when he talks about fighting for her in the Netherlands until he wins her back (and gets a blowjob in the bargain) with a flat recitation of "O Mistress Mine." Then when she learns she's knocked up she insists to Cecil that she wants to marry Oxford and has another screaming hissy fit when he refuses and insists on the importance of her ability to string continental princes along. Also half of the English nobility appears to consist of her illegitimate offspring, which she apparently has time to have before farming them out to noble families who raise them as their own heirs. Because succession totally works that way. Anyway, it is a deeply offensive performance in all ways, and contributed greatly to the rage headache I had afterwards.
2. Another portrayal I really hated -- and I've mentioned this before, I think, but the film lived down to my expectations -- was that of Ben Jonson (played uninterestingly by Sebastian Armesto). The film's Jonson is a not-very-competent aspirer, declining Oxford's offer to let him put his name to the plays on the grounds that they don't sound like his voice. Oxford replies "You have no voice! That's why I chose you!" Which. FUCK YOU, MOVIE. I can't think of an early modern playwright with MORE of a voice than Ben Jonson, whose personality is so clearly manifested in his works -- which we know because he talked about himself ALL THE TIME. (And, as a side note, he was also an inveterate gossip, and yet somehow we're expected to believe he'd talk to Drummond of Hawthornden about Queen Elizabeth's gynecological problems -- seriously, that is in there -- and Shakespeare's lack of "art" but not his BIG HUGE SECRET?) Anyway he ends up being WON OVER by Oxford's BEAUTIFUL WORDS and is charged with preserving the plays for posterity, risking torture to do so. Also nobody else is depicted as having written anything worthwhile in the entire Elizabethan period. There's a group of indistinguishable early modern playwrights who watch Oxford's plays, rag on The Shoemaker's Holiday for no reason, engage in gay panic jokes, and, in the case of undead Christopher Marlowe, fink Shakespeare out to "the Tower" before getting killed by Shakespeare for his trouble. Bah. You can also go here to read Jonson biographer Ian Donaldson's commentary on the movie.
3. Finally, I regret to say that this movie may have ruined Derek Jacobi for me. There is apparently a huge gulf between knowing someone is Stupid About Authorship and actually watching him get all up in our faces onscreen about it. (Mark Rylance is in this movie too, but he is madder than several boxes of frogs, and also all of his dialogue is actual lines from Shakespeare. We get to hear him recite most of the opening speech to Richard III -- which is in the universe of the movie written in 1601 specifically to make fun of Robert Cecil, who actually was a bit hunchbacked, and who wasn't a really prominent figure at court when the play was ACTUALLY WRITTEN circa 1592; another fun message of this movie is that people with disabilities are EEEEVIL -- but he is pelted offstage with vegetables before he can finish, because the people just hate Cecil THAT MUCH. Anyway, his relative lack of pontification means he's less tarnished by the movie in my eyes.) And it makes me really sad, because I love his acting! But I'm not sure I'll ever be able to watch, say, his superb Richard II again without hearing him sneeringly declaiming the "Soul of the age" bit from Jonson's dedicatory Folio verse, the words dripping with classist disgust (despite that Jacobi is himself the son of a tobacconist, and is himself a knight, although the film mocks Shakespeare for buying a coat of arms) and that is pretty heartbreaking. Fuck you, Sir Derek, and fuck you, movie, for destroying something I loved.
*I know there's some debate about the identity of the play in question, although I think it's most likely that it was Shakespeare's Richard II, but it was unquestionably a play about Richard II and not Richard III.