Inventing Anna (2022, Exec. Producer Shonda Rhimes):
I think she’s a young woman who tried to get over in a world in which we celebrate getting over. We celebrate it when people do it and do it right. The Instagram image of your life is the life you’re supposed to be leading. And we celebrate the people who can get it.
Shonda Rhimes
Do you know who I am? Throughout Netflix’s Inventing Anna, New York socialite Anna Delvey (Julia Garner) snaps this question whenever she lands in a sticky situation. It’s her default retort, but it’s also a refrain, an existential hook. Anyone unfamiliar with Anna should read Jessica Pressler’s New York Magazine article on her infamous con games, which ensnared the upper strata of the Big Apple’s finance, fashion and art worlds. As a tidy summation of our money-addicted, narcissistic, social media-heavy culture, you won’t find many “fake it til you make it” tales more topical than Anna’s, or more ready-made for a flashy TV show (not to mention an upcoming docuseries). But instead of just taking Anna to task for her crimes, Inventing Anna focuses on one pressing question: who is she, really?
It’s no surprise to find executive producer Shonda Rhimes’ name in the show’s credits: like a designer outfit, Anna’s power games, skullduggery and heaping helpings of sauciness are tailor-made for the Rhimes imprimatur. Over nine leisurely episodes, we view Anna through the eyes of journalist Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), a character stand-in for Pressler. Very pregnant and desperate to break a blockbuster story, Vivian smells blood when she hears about Anna’s arrest for fraud. (No points for guessing that Vivian will be under the gun to deliver her story at the same exact moment she needs to deliver her baby.) The tale’s elements are irresistible: Anna (real name: Anna Sorokin) is a twentysomething with unconfirmed origins, an Instagram-obsessed upstart seeking to make a mark in a town that privileges money and connections, an opportunist who hoodwinks everyone she comes across. Among her criminal trespasses is lying her way into using a private jet that ordinarily costs $35,000, and living at fancy hotels for months at a time without paying for a thing. As Vivian interviews people who were bamboozled, she assembles a fragmentary portrait of Anna, from her youth as a Russian émigré in Germany to her bold entrance into Manhattan’s high life, as she alternately charms and swindles the city’s elite. The so-called heiress’s ultimate aim: lease a ritzy Park Avenue building for an art society (the “Anna Delvey Foundation”) that is essentially a tribute to her own fabulosity. The snag: Anna doesn’t have one red cent to her name, even as she courts a $25 million loan and throws money around at hotels and restaurants like it’s confetti.
As each anecdote unfurls, we meet a host of colorful characters: Chase (Saamer Usmani), Anna’s smarmy entrepreneur ex-boyfriend who turns out to be as much a faker as she is, only less convincing; Alan (Anthony Edwards), the skeptical finance lawyer who nonetheless falls hook, line and sinker for Anna’s shtick; Nora (Kate Burton), a high-and-mighty mogul who treats Anna like a servant and receives an appropriate comeuppance for her snobbery; Todd (Arian Moayed), Anna’s more-menschy-than-mensch lawyer; and Val (James Cusati-Moyer), a caustic fashion designer who gets one of the series’ more poignant moments when Anna reduces him to quivering impotence with a single lie.
Inventing Anna plays fast and loose with fact and fiction; we’re reminded at the start of each episode, “This whole story is completely true except for all the parts that are totally made up.” Amazingly, the most implausible moments (like Anna briefly rooming with Billy MacFarland, the fraudster behind the Fyre Festival) are true to life. What rings less true is Vivian’s progression from curious journalist to full-fledged Anna supporter, to the point where she picks out outfits for Anna to wear in her court appearances. While the show wants to know what makes Anna tick, it’s also invested in Vivian’s relationship with Anna, as the two circle like hawks in their interviews, each viewing the other as a meal ticket to notoriety. To further drive home the parallels, Vivian’s boss (Tim Guinee) is portrayed as a symbol of entitled patriarchy, much like the money men Anna outfoxes. Such narrative decisions might make thematic sense, but Vivian remains a flat character who seesaws between two emotions—flummoxed and exasperated—with the overemphatic Chlumsky struggling to find the subtleties in between.
Rhimes is on firmer ground when it comes to showing how Anna gets away with everything short of murder. There’s an undeniable thrill in watching the would-be magnate use her bullheadedness to wriggle out of trouble every time she meets resistance or condescension, and as with any confidence scam, we imagine ourselves as both scammer and victim. Would I be capable of doing the same? Would I know I was being conned? These scenes are sardonic rather than gleeful: while her uppity victims aren’t very sympathetic, Anna, armed with hauteur to spare, apparently takes little pleasure in her wrongdoing. If anything, she seems to believe she is exactly who she says she is: a visionary go-getter who just needs one big break to make everything work out.
Which brings us back to the opening question: Do you know who I am? While real-life Anna remains an enigma (in her social media posts and interviews, she remains a self-aggrandizing presence), Rhimes has re-imagined her as an underdog who might be from her Bridgerton or Scandal: a woman armed with chutzpah, continually underestimated by rich and powerful men. Just as nearly everyone Anna comes into contact with is seduced by her odd mix of coarseness and sincerity, Rhimes invites us to view her with grudging admiration while she fools the entitled Wall Street-ers who initially dismiss her as a nobody. Sure she’s a liar and a thief, but here’s someone who wouldn’t take it lying down. Even Vivian’s posse of grizzled magazine colleagues (Anna Deavere Smith, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry) come to root for the little schemer; she’s no hero, but at least she seems more worthy of respect than the snooty people she triumphs over.
Or is she? That question permeates the second half of the series, in which Anna’s antics exact a more personal cost. First she takes advantage of Neff (Alexis Floyd), a hotel concierge who becomes her BFF and lets her get away with not paying the bills, risking her career in the process. That sequence is later topped by a trip to Morocco in which Anna invites a handful of pals to a swanky resort and shirks paying the bills, much to management’s displeasure. It’s left up to Anna’s friend Rachel (Katie Lowes) to avert disaster by using her corporate credit card, with the understanding that Anna will pay back their tab of over $60,000 (spoiler alert: she doesn’t). The incident is right in Rhimes’s wheelhouse—lies, bitchery, humiliation and lots of money at stake—and Rachel’s dawning realization that she’s being played is the show’s one moment of honest tension.
But as the story winds down in the sour aftermath of those events, Inventing Anna loses most of its zing. Finally forced to confront the enigma of who Anna is, Rhimes can only keep rolling with what she’s already been working with: more Instagram fashion displays, more hammy performances, more loaded dialogue between Anna and Vivian that promises revelation but stops far short of illumination. Most of the actors come off well despite the near-cartoonish bents to their characters: Laverne Cox radiates decency as Anna’s New Age-y fitness instructor Kacey, while Floyd’s Neff, who remains Anna’s BFF against all odds, is a canny mix of street-smart bravado and uncertainty. Lowes does what she can in an unflattering role, as the show paints Rachel as a naive star-chaser who claims to be “traumatized” by what’s happened to her, even as she pockets a hefty book contract to tell her version of the Anna story. (It should be noted that Rhimes’s production company bought the rights to Anna’s story off the real Anna herself, so the filmmakers may not have been predisposed to show Rachel in a positive light.) In contrast to the other actors’ broad performances, Garner goes the opposite direction as Anna: she gives her slippery character an emotional directness even when her motives are at their most opaque. She may score laughs with her confounding accent (modeled after the real Delvey’s voice), but she’s magnetic every time she’s forced to stop and think, as her bespectacled eyes register desperation, avarice, and even a bit of hurt.
But even Garner can’t compensate for the gaping hole in the middle of her character. In real life, Anna has been imprisoned and is now scheduled to be deported—perhaps a harsh fate for a mere trickster, especially compared to similar tricksters who have suffered far less severe punishment. But is there anything resonant in her story? Is the scammer any less superficial than the scammed? Late in the game, Vivian meets Anna’s mother in the hopes of finding out how Anna became who she is. The old woman reflects: “It is better to believe monsters make monsters.” Once you get past haute couture, sass and snark, oh-so-fashionable social media posts from the court room, con games. and accusations, we’re left with a woman who might be an unprincipled monster, a plucky underdog, a schemer who got in over her head, or all of the above—and none of it seems to really matter. “Do you know who I am?” Anna asks; Inventing Anna suggests that there might be something important, and even profound, in seeking the answer to that question. The show’s ultimate failing is not that it doesn’t give us a definitive answer, but that it doesn’t compel us to care one way or the other. As Gertrude Stein might conclude with a sigh: a scam is a scam is a scam. ■
