Anonymous - Do You Buy It?

(Rhys Ifans as Edward de Vere in Anonymous)
(2011) ★★★☆☆

Even if you never read any of William Shakespeare’s plays (I did, but forgot already, all of them), you must’ve heard about him, more or less. He’s considered the greatest poet and playwright ever in English literature. His works are so magnificent and influential that after so many years, we can still get something out of them for ourselves. But in ‘Anonymous’, William Shakespeare’s nothing but an illiterate, unscrupulous piece of crap. This film’s, as a matte of fact, nothing about William Shakespeare himself like it seems. It instead centers on a man named Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans) who’s believed to be the true author of William Shakespeare’s plays. Wow! I’ve got to hand it to those skeptics.

Certainly the director Roland Emmerich, who once made disaster films like ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ‘The Independent Day’ and stuff, buys such an idea. Anyway, I don’t. I guess William Shakespeare is too famous to be a fake. If he was like the film said he was, we would’ve known for sure. Such a secret can’t possibly be kept for long. It’s like people’s doubt about whether we really set foot on the Moon. Come on, man, are you too bored or what? And Mr. Shakespeare’s definitely not illiterate, as most of the historians know. Whatever, it’s not who wrote those plays that we should care. What we should spend time studying and learning are those brilliant words a genius left us, ‘words made of breath, and breath of life’.

‘Anonymous’ is a dark, gloomy historical drama. Things happening in there are part real, part made up. I’m not familiar with that part of history. Therefore I’m fine with this pretty dramatic yet a bit disturbing piece of cinema. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean ‘disturbing’ here!