BEFORE: I picked films this week just because they were all (semi-)biographical, but an unintended theme has shown itself - that of skepticism, or perhaps debunking. We had Charles Darwin's evolution theory debunking creationism, and Houdini's skepticism toward psychics and mediums. Tonight, the authorship of Shakespeare's plays gets called into question.
Linking tonight is again made possible by "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1" which starred both Timothy Spall from "Death Defying Acts" and Rhys Ifans (last seen in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"), who appears at the center of tonight's film. It makes sense, there were a ton of British actors in that Potter series.
THE PLOT: The theory that it was in fact Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, who penned Shakespeare's plays, set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I and the Essex rebellion against her.
AFTER: In addition to the theme of skepticism, this is the third film this week to attempt to tell a story in a non-linear fashion. Like "Creation", this film toggles back and forth between two timelines, one when Queen Elizabeth was young, and one when she was old. In an inspired (or lazy?) bit of casting, the Queen is played by 2 actresses, who are mother and daughter in the real world.
But there's very little warning when the film shifts from the older past to the umm...more recent past. It's very confusing at first, but eventually if you pay attention you can see resemblances among the characters, and if you can keep the names of the various earls and court ministers straight, you can then tell from the visual cues when a time-jump has been made. Normally here I would accuse the filmmakers of attempting to cover up a weak narrative, but despite my personal vendetta, this is one of the rare cases where mixing up the scenes is justified.
Why? Because there's valuable information in both storylines that needs to be revealed slowly, bit by bit. If these scenes were laid out chronologically, the audience would learn things before the characters would - and this way we're just as much in the dark as they are, until they're not. As both storylines progress, we eventually learn that the Virgin Queen might not have been so virginal, and therefore the line of succession is jeopardized.
Oh, yeah, the Shakespeare thing. The film points out that the Bard of Avon might have been just this side of illiterate (he could read, but not write?) and that it does seem a little funny that an actor with no formal education failed his way upward to becoming the world's greatest playwright. That he was able to write so many brilliant plays in such a brief period of time - one explanation is that he was just a figurehead, and that the well-educated Earl of Oxford, who had been writing plays in secret for years, was supplying him with finished plays, each at the appropriate time to further his own political agenda.
I know there's a literary movement to discredit Shakespeare as a playwright - I wonder if those people saw this film and thought, "No, this isn't what we meant at all!" There is an attempt here to show the genesis for certain characters in De Vere's backstory - and it does give special meaning to Hamlet's play-within-a-play that was meant to expose a royal scandal. Why wouldn't Shakespeare's plays be targeted at specific political targets as well, to rally public opinion against them?
But, saying that Richard III was designed to discredit the queen's advisers, just because Shakespeare's character was a hunchback, that seems like convenient retro-fitting. It's a bit like saying you know God exists because someone wrote a book about him. This is all a bit of a stretch, and it makes me wonder about the agenda of the people behind this film - see, it's just as easy for me to be skeptical.
Tomorrow night, we prove that men didn't walk on the moon. Just kidding.
Also starring Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Mary, Queen of Scots" - ooh, the irony!), David Thewlis (last seen in, you guessed it, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1"), Joely Richardson (last seen in "King Ralph"), Rafe Spall (son of Timothy, last seen in "Hot Fuzz"), Sebastian Armesto, Edward Hogg, Xavier Samuel, Sam Reid.
RATING: 4 out of 10 quill pens
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