Review of 'Inventing Anna'

The wife and I binged Inventing Anna the past few nights, the nine-episode Shonda Rhimes series detailing the real-life rise and fall of Anna Delvey aka Anna Sorokin. It's superb television, for a bunch a reasons. Julia Garner in the title role was perfect, peerless, and Emmy-worthy. Pretty much the same for Anna Chlumsky who plays Vivian Kent, the fictitious name for the real reporter Jessica Pressler whose New York magazine story "How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People" is the basis of the Netflix series. I haven't read the story, but the story in the movie is an incredible, powerful tale of a con artist, Anna, so charismatic that her lawyer and Vivian in their own ways practically fell in some kind of love with her.

But the question arises, as it always does with docu-dramas in any case, but especially those that tell us that what we see on the screen is true except when it isn't, about how much that we see on the screen is true? My wife did a little research, for example, and found that Jessica was pregnant while she was researching and reporting Anna's story, but didn't actually give birth at the crucial time that Vivien did in the series. Does that matter?

Well, no and yes. No, because, if the story on the screen is as riveting as Inventing Anna, what does it matter how much truth it conveys? But, yes, because part of the very reason that we find this narrative so riveting is our assumption that most of it is indeed truth, or closely based upon it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his Biographia Literaria back in 1817 about the "willing suspension of disbelief" that is the essential foundation for the enjoyment of poetry. We may know that the words are in whatever degree fictitious, i.e., not completely truthful. But our mind puts that aside and we laugh, cry, and everything in between about what we see on the page and now screen as if they were indeed 100% real.

So, by that standard, Inventing Anna gets the highest grade. Still, one cannot suspend one's disbelief forever. Fortunately in this case, the real world is still very much with us, and it will be fun and instructive, more than fun, to see what happens with Anna in the years ahead.

In the meantime, in addition to Garner and Chlumsky, I thought Katie Lowes as Rachel and Anthony Edwards as Alan put in especially memorable performances in this unique memorable series.