A moderately engaging fraud, the nine-episode miniseries “Inventing Anna” brings up the question of focus, and sending a true-scam narrative down intersecting tracks.
I think the thinking behind the story structure here goes like this. Netflix subscribers are being asked to stick with nine-plus hours of peculiar true-crime developments as packaged by miniseries creator Shonda Rhimes. The episodes map out the Manhattan chicanery of cryptic German socialite Anna Delvey, who was really Anna Sorokin, played by Julia Garner of “Ozark” (and “The Assistant”! She’s great in “The Assistant”).
The Netflix series, which reportedly paid Sorokin more than she was imprisoned for stealing, is a fictionalized gloss of true events, as told in New York magazine writer Jessica Pressler’s popular Delvey profile. The 2018 story detailed a fool’s parade of high-flying financial, social, media and tech suckers who believed their snide, weirdly compelling new friend’s dreams of creating a Soho House for an even more insufferable crowd. (Pardon my raging class issues.)
Is one Mysterious Unknowable Antiheroine enough for this thing? Maybe, maybe not, but this question clearly was on the creators’ minds. It explains the generous story acreage devoted in “Inventing Anna” to a semi-faithful revision of Pressley, named Vivian and played by Anna Chlumsky. Racing her own pregnancy, the intrepid if grating journalist pursues the story that has a chance of restoring her previously tarnished journalistic reputation.
Over on narrative track two, meanwhile, the manipulations of Delvey/Sorokin unfold in flashbacks, in Manhattan, Morocco, Paris and Ibiza. Each episode of “Inventing Anna” hinges on a different acquaintance, friend or victim in this young striver’s wobbly circle of friends.
In order to sustain the running time, five credited directors and six writers require more than just slow-building schadenfreude (when will the fake German socialite get her comeuppance?). They need more than sneaky, grudging admiration mixed with pathos for the antiheroine. They need more than the expected Shondaland glamour: zippy transitions and split-screen graphics; needle drops for days, and nights, of debauchery, followed by bill avoidance; and drone shots of yachts or resorts that look fine.
By the fourth episode, “Inventing Anna” lets the audience get way, way out ahead of the characters, so very, very slow to wise up to their little friend’s big lies. There’s a fair amount to enjoy in spite of this, even when the reiterations become frustrating. The cast is all in, although not even Laverne Cox as a fitness trainer can un-clunk-ify the line “Stand in your truth, fortified by kindness, and tell your story, you bad bitch!”
Some criticisms of Garner’s performance have, I think, mixed up what’s up to the actors and what’s on the writers. The writers’ notion of Anna is not so much fruitfully mysterious as it is simply opaque. Garner goes whole hog with a Slavic-Germanic-comic-operatic dialect. Beyond that, Garner’s is a stealthy performance, with shards of wit not always present in the script.
Still, the series’ heart belongs elsewhere. As Neff, the savvy hotel worker and friend to the end, Alexis Floyd is fabulous — wised-up, dryly skeptical, with line readings that never go quite where you think they’ll go. Arian Moayed’s defense attorney carries his scenes with gravity and levity in cleverly equal measure. (Like Floyd’s role, he’s based on a real person, not a composite; there’s a fair bit in both categories here.) And as Vivian’s perpetually available colleagues, stuck in a clump of cubicles known as “Scriberia,” Anna Deavere Smith, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry tote whole barges of exposition like the pros they are.
“Inventing Anna” probably would’ve worked better had it focused more intently on the public and private faces of Anna — or, alternatively, back-benching her in favor of those who got caught in her web. As is it’s a little of both, and I got a slight “Julie & Julia” headache each time we left the Anna universe for the latest bullet-sweating Vivian interlude. Anna’s marks look like dolts, because the series doesn’t satisfactorily answer the biggest question of all: What made this woman in the big black specs such a good time, or an attractive risk, at least for a while?
Popular culture retains a ravenous appetite for New York stories of garish, hostile wealth earned, or borrowed, or stolen, the easy way, whether it’s a wolf of Wall Street or a “Gilded Age” Old Money vs. New Money sneer-off. “Inventing Anna” isn’t a tough watch. The actors do a lot to compensate for what’s missing. But it’s overly devoted to the Vivian part of the story. If anything, I found myself wishing Alexis Floyd’s Neff could somehow spin off her own series, right in the middle of this one.
———
‘INVENTING ANNA’
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA (language, sexual material, relentless macking on wealth)
Running time: Nine episodes, approximately nine hours total
Where to watch: Now streaming on Netflix
———
