Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora
ANORA
Both the funniest and saddest Cinderella tale you've ever seen, writer/director Sean Baker's Anora is a great movie with some great big problems. On a first viewing, I found much of the film redundant (making it also feel overlong), and a few intentionally obnoxious moments edged closer to excruciating, and one actor in a major role, I thought, needed to deliver about twice the charm and charisma he exuded. Yet even with weekend work duties and The Penguin's devastating series finale to distract me, I have not been able to stop thinking about Baker's brilliantly structured, emotionally overpowering achievement. The Palme d'Or winner at this past spring's Cannes Film Festival, Anora is a comedy, a drama, a romance (maybe a pair of them), and even a borderline thriller nested inside an inverted fairy tale. In other words, it probably shouldn't have worked. It does, though, and so beautifully that my considerable gripes, by the end credits, came to seem thoroughly dismissible.
Played by a thunderously present Mikey Madison, our titular heroine, who prefers to be called Ani, is an exotic dancer and occasional escort eking out a modest living at a posh Manhattan strip club. Saddled with a crummy Brighton Beach apartment and a roommate she doesn't like, Ani, though content enough, is clearly in a rut. That changes, however, with the arrival of Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), an über-wealthy young Russian who, at the club, requests a dancer that speaks his native language. As Ani is the only employee who qualifies, having learned Russian as a youth from her grandmother, she introduces herself to Ivan, and the two hit it off. Really hit it off. Before long, 21-year-old Ivan is paying 23-year-old Ani for both lap dances and sex, and asking her to be his (similarly paid) week-long girlfriend in the Brooklyn mansion owned by his oligarch father. All of her childhood princess fantasies suddenly coming to life, the initially wary Ani accepts the offer, entering a whirlwind of lavish parties and freewheeling spending and liquor and drugs and sex (when Ivan isn't playing video games), as well as a spontaneous trip to Vegas. That's where Ivan proposes marriage and Ani accepts. They wed in a tacky all-night chapel. They're unspeakably happy. But what will Ivan's daddy make of this?
Although most of his latest feels as naturalistic and improvisational as Baker's other films – they include Tangerine, Red Rocket, and his previous career high The Florida Project – Anora actually boasts a rather rigorous, easily identifiable three-act structure. The events I've described constitute the first act, and it's the movie's least effective one. To be sure, there's exquisite detail in the goings-on at Ani's strip club. We may only see them in brief glimpses, but as written and performed, Ani's bosses and co-workers ooze so much personality that we immediately glean where everyone stands in the workplace hierarchy, and sense how the customers rank, too. And from her first scene, Madison is breathtaking. Ani is a practical gal who knows better than to fall for some cute kid who tosses hundred-dollar bills around the joint. Yet Madison, with marvelous subtlety, lets you witness the tiny shifts in Ani's expressions and bearing as she considers whether Ivan's infatuation is legit, and whether her long-buried dreams might actually come true. Fierce, funny, seductive, and wickedly profane throughout, Madison is also disarmingly moving – even in Anora's first third, well before Ani's and Ivan's rushed plans go inevitably awry. (After her appearances in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and the 2022 Scream, its a genuine thrill to find Baker's lead on fire as opposed to being set on fire.)
Madison is so good here that she manages to convince us that Ivan is charming, and that's important, because Eydelshteyn doesn't appear quite up to the task. To be fair, it's entirely possible that his callow performance is exactly what Baker wanted, as a way to signal from the start that Ivan might not be the life-changing dreamboat Ani sees him as. Yet noxious entitlement and self-aggrandizement can be played without the actor himself coming off as insufferable. (The Schitt's Creek family was collectively masterful at this.) And despite his gift for motor-mouthed gab and resemblance to Timothée Chalamet, Eydelshteyn doesn't suggest what Ani sees in Ivan beyond his (parents') money. He isn't especially funny or attentive, and Lord knows he doesn't have anything interesting to say; it's even suggested – nay, voiced – that Ivan could stand to learn a thing or two in the bedroom. We really only believe in Ivan as a romantic ideal because Ani so clearly wants to believe in him. It would've probably led to more compelling, more complicated stakes had the audience, too, been put in Ani's position of falling head over heels for the guy. As is, however, we more accurately want our heroine to take the money and run.
Of course, her doing so would make the rest of the film irrelevant, and it's at the 45-minute mark that Anora's romantic comedy morphs into a screwball comedy – and a fantastically enjoyable one. Without revealing narrative specifics, because surprise is one of the movie's deepest pleasures, suffice it to say that Ivan's father gets wind of his son's marriage to a woman he thinks is a prostitute (and he's not altogether wrong). He consequently sends three of his enforcers out to correct matters: Toros (Karrenm Karaguilan), Ivan's Armenian godfather and an Orthodox priest; Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), Toros' physically intimidating brother; and Igor (Yura Borisov), a largely silent Russian obviously practiced with a baseball bat. When they show up, all manner of Hell breaks loose along with any number of broken mansion tchotchkes, and Baker's latest briefly blasts into the comedic stratosphere. Yet the laughs resonate. What you quickly discern is that, just like Ani at the club, these increasingly panicked henchmen are under the powerful financial thumbs of others. They don't have autonomy; they merely have orders. And while the hired goons' goal in the story is evident, it's their purpose that's more satisfyingly complex. Baker, in his works, has always been fascinated with marginalized figures. Here, he takes a deep dive into the lingering effects of marginalization, and what results is a tragicomic high-wire act in which no one (aside from the unspeakably rich) is the stereotype you presume, and everyone is simply trying to get by as best they can.
Despite my admiration and affection for Karaguilan, Tovmasyan, and the priceless Borisov, the midsection of Baker's movie too often repeats itself – just as the first section gives us too many sequences of Ani and Ivan in edgy-pop-fueled bliss – and the director sometimes lets his star go too far in her screeching ferocity. (When Igor finally gagged Ani's mouth with a scarf to prevent her from screaming, it took considerable will not to applaud.) Still, the gorgeously written, enthusiastically helmed Anora packs a major punch, with many of its sharpest hits coming from the seemingly throwaway: an exotic dancer rallying her friends with a joyous “It's a fight!”; a thug offhandedly lighting two cigarettes, one to give to his angry charge; the discovery that, when Ivan calls, the name that appears on her phone is “Husband.” Happily, the movie also saves its finest third for the third third. Again, I'm keeping mum on the details. But after so much energetic noise, I absolutely relished the comparative quiet, and might never forget the heartbreaking perfection of the final 15 minutes, and the climax in particular: just two people, and a snowstorm, and the rhythmically mundane sound of windshield wipers. At the screening I attended, the dozen-or-so of us in attendance didn't move when the end credits started rolling. I'm not entirely sure we remembered to breathe.
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER
If you've seen the trailers, you might presume that The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is simply a prototypical, unsubtle, brightly lit seasonal slapstick. And it is. But if you've read the 1972 Barbara Park novel the film is based on, or, as I have, seen Park's stage version of her book, then you know the secret to the material's popularity: It's really good. Funny without being pandering, touching without being saccharine, pro-Christian without being preachy, Park's literary bear hug, which is like the scruffy second cousin to Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. from two years prior, is a true rarity among family entertainments. I'm delighted to say that it gets the adaptation it deserves in director Dallas Jenkins' interpretation.
As fans know, TBCPE concerns the chaos that ensues after “the worst kids in the world” – an apparently parentless crew of six grade-school-aged-and-younger Herdman children – decide to participate in a small town's annual church pageant, not knowing a thing in advance about (a) Jesus, (b) the Nativity, or (c) polite human interaction. By the end, of course, everyone learns valuable lessons about false perceptions and prejudice and giving others a chance. But the road to those insights is a frequently hilarious one, and I was thrilled that screenwriters Ryan Swanson, Platte Clark, and Darin McDaniel didn't in any way dial down Park's lovingly biting prose. The Herdmans haven't been made less hateful to placate modern squeamishness – eldest sibling Imogene (Beatrice Schneider) still smokes cigars! – and some of the young actors' readings are downright feral, even if their language never is. Together, they're like a rampaging team of Scut Farkuses, and when they can't believe the birth-of-Christ story they're told (“They wrapped him up in a barn and put him in a box?!”), they have no compunction about figuratively tearing the Bible to shreds. In short, I adored these pint-sized hellions.
Really, though, there's almost nothing here to not like, beginning with Judy Greer's simultaneously daffy and earthbound performance as pageant director Grace Bradley. As magical a second banana as Greer traditionally is, why on earth does this phenomenal talent – a knockout comedian with built-in poignancy – not land more leading roles? She's utterly heavenly in Jenkins' film, and nicely matched by Pete Holmes as Grace's sweetly befuddled husband Bob. But it's the young talents who truly make this Best Holiday Pageant Ever shine, and amidst all the friskiness and mayhem, Schneider's Imogene brings to the table legitimate yearning and wonder … when she's not, you know, stealing fellow students' beloved heirlooms or taking the Lord's name in vain. (Schneider is able to make an exasperated “God!” sound like the foulest of curses.) I'd even argue that this adaptation betters its source material in one respect, because at the end, title cards reveal what happened to all the Herdmans after they grew up – a necessary addition given how upsetting and bleak their adult-free living conditions appear on-screen. I doubt it's a spoiler to say they all turned into respectable members of society. Well, with one exception. As this “Where are they now?” kicker reminds us, when it comes to recidivism, one out of six ain't bad.
