Anonymous (2011)

Roland Emmerich, a director best known for freezing the Statue of Liberty and flattening the White House, here turns his attention to the Elizabethan succession and the theory that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. It is a curious career move, executed with a straight face and an enormous budget. The cast is white, the court is white, the entire enterprise is white, which is historically defensible and offers nothing in the way of inclusive casting. Nobody in this film is asking to be seen.

The scandals on offer are dynastic: illegitimacy, incest, poisoned succession, a queen who bore children in secret. These are taboos of a sixteenth-century variety, and the film treats them as plot machinery. Queen Elizabeth holds power, but the screenplay has no interest in interrogating patriarchy, and the noblemen around her are too busy arguing about who wrote Henry V to organize a critique of wealth. There is no climate anxiety, no body diversity, no neurodivergent subplot, no racial commentary, no economic rage. The poor are present as a mob, which is the oldest arrangement in the business.

The film does possess a lecturing instinct, delivered by Derek Jacobi from a modern theatre, solemnly explaining that Shakespeare could not possibly have written the canon. The sermon concerns authorship, not justice. History gets rewritten here, but toward a literary conspiracy, not a moral one. Emmerich has made an argument picture, and the argument is entirely about quills. A strange, handsome, thoroughly harmless artifact, and it registers on the modern cultural seismograph at precisely nothing.