This becomes especially apparent when she convinces a rich husband of a friend to invest in a venture capital bullshit startup, Wake (probably the most accurate satire in the entire series, it’s an app that instrumentalizes dreams). He ends up dating her. They break up through a power struggle when she starts really wanting to build her own thing, the Anna Delvey Foundation. The comedy of the fact that she specifically wanted to be paid to be a philanthropic socialite is completely glossed over.
Instead, the series insists on imbuing Anna with the noblest of motives: naïveté and belief in the goodness of her project. “I think she was moving on faith. I don’t know if this was totally a scam, I think she believed,” Vivian muses out loud. The show proceeds to undercut such sentiments, but given that baseline, any kind of self-interest by Anna is then supposed to be moral complexity.
The show inflates the supposed friendships Anna has with life coach Kacy (Laverne Cox), hotel concierge and aspiring filmmaker Neff (Alexis Floyd), and Vanity Fair photo editor Rachel (Katie Lowes), who in real life wrote a Vanity Fair article and book about her friendship.
The few moments that feel charged are in the relationship between Anna and Rachel as Anna creates a situation that pressures her into paying $60,000 for a trip to Marrakesh. In that single moment, one gets a real sense of how Anna operated. And the show isn’t afraid to make Rachel annoying either, especially her colonizing tourist appetites. But the question of their friendship, and whether it was genuine or not, which the show emphasizes, isn’t that interesting.
It’s Rachel who ultimately brings down Anna, and she’s now set to be depicted in her own HBO miniseries. There’s ultimately something of a con at the heart of this show: Because Pressler is a producer, and as we’re told by the end, the “entire series is inspired by Pressler’s reporting,” viewers will be left wondering which information might be made up, and which might have come from the reporter, including the few bits of actually new information in here. For instance, when Vivian flies out to investigate Anna’s backstory, her mom gives a chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin moment when she states that some children are just “strangers under your roof” and “Anna was a stranger her whole life, a cold stranger.”
And aside from such moments, Inventing Anna suffers from what we might at this point call explainer syndrome. This is the issue with streamers buying stories that are already well known and assuming — perhaps correctly — that the public will want to see everything they already know about the case laid out. But even though Netflix bought Anna Sorokin’s story for a reported $320,000, that over-reliance on her perspective just made it harder to depart from the story enough to really get at something original.
The recent HBO show The Landscapers benefitted from focusing on a more obscure couple of English supposed grifters who were accused of murdering the wife’s parents and then impersonating them supposedly for the money. The writers turned the story into a riveting tale about trauma, the mystery of marriage, and the stories people tell themselves and others to survive.
In trying to make the show about gossip and the media, Inventing Anna actually misses whatever it is that Anna herself was up to and rather focused on what she thought she was doing. Instead of adding complexity, it just comes off as muddled. ●
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alessadominguez/inventing-anna-netflix-review-anna-delvey
