Anyone else watching/watched "Inventing Anna" on Netflix?

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1

A search of posts to date on the SDMB shows that @Chefguy watched “Inventing Anna” (all episodes released on Netflix on Feb. 22, 2022) and wasn’t overly impressed. That’s consistent with the reviews I’ve found on line, which aren’t scathing, but they are lukewarm.

I thought it was excellent through about episode 5, after which it became somewhat inconsistent, jarring in its transitions, or … I dunno, I’m not a trained critic, so I’m not really prepared after one viewing to analyze it the way an academic might. But it definitely started showing some distracting flaws that pulled me away from being absorbed in the story. I’m partly into ep 9 now, slightly irritated, and really ready for the mini series to end. Lukewarm reviews seem about right.

BUT … that is far from the entire story. I know zero about the TV show production industry, but I see that Shonda Rhimes is apparently the creator, executive producer and show runner, under her brand “Shondaland.”

I’m a huge fan of what I see of Shondaland through this miniseries. In it, people of color actually exist quite often, without needing any heavy-handed “look at this!” commentary by the TV show, in all sorts of roles. Many of those roles are authoritative and professional, and all of them are human. That’s the world I want to live in.

I also like that Laverne Cox has a role as a compelling Black woman without any explicit recognition of the fact she’s transgender - she’s a sympathetic character first and foremost. If you care to focus on the fact she is a Black transgender woman, sure, fine, go ahead, hopefully you will cheer her on and your recognition of who she is will elevate your tolerance and understanding*. But she’s a complex character first, informed but not defined or limited by her race, gender, and trans status.

TLDR: “Inventing Anna” is a reasonably entertaining if flawed miniseries, but Shondaland is where I want to live.

  • Assuming you yourself are not a Black transgender woman, and thus it might be a mind-expanding exercise to put yourself in the shoes of someone who is.
2

My wife and I watched the first six episodes together. Then I tapped out and she finished them without me.

I was ready to give up after three episodes, but then the fourth episode was excellent and I hung on for a bit longer. More on that in a moment.

For me, the series is fundamentally misconceived. It seems to be built around a core question, asking, “Who is this mysterious person who was able to deceive the elite of New York society?” The answer is, a con artist. And the problem is, con artists do not make for interesting character studies, because there is no character there — a con artist is simply an empty shell of greed and dishonesty and fabricated humanity with nothing at the core. They lie without conscience until they’re either caught or they move on. They’re just not interesting as people, and the show’s apparent belief that there’s anything at all fascinating about Anna herself beyond her uncanny facility for chameleonic deception — anything about her as a person — is, I believe, a fatal error.

The real interest in a story about a scam like this is in how the targets are deceived. I don’t mean this from the perspective of the scam, letting us watch as the con artist actively deceiving his or her marks — I mean from the perspective of the scammed, why they were vulnerable, and, more importantly, the ways in which they actively buy into the deception and, in many ways, actively participate in fooling themselves.

But instead, the show wastes a lot of time focusing on Anna herself, on her mental and emotional state, as she struggles to keep her story together and invent new angles of manufactured narrative, which is just inherently un-dramatic. And the show seems to realize this, too, at least subconsciously, which is why I think it spends so much time in the penumbra of the central story, with the internal politicking at the magazine and Anna’s lawyer struggling with the case and all the other marginal stuff. It’s extra conflict, dramatic wheel-spinning, to make up for the giant hole in the middle of the show.

Which is why the fourth episode, for me, was so strong: Anna targets this powerful, well-connected corporate attorney, someone who’s got lots of experience in New York finance and is supposed to be savvy about how things work. But we see the seams in his psychology, and when she lands a couple of well-placed tactical arguments, we watch as he becomes an active participant in self-deception. That is interesting character-based storytelling, and I thought the show was finally finding its feet.

But then it slipped back into its previous nonsense, and lost the handle on why a story like this is worth telling.

The next couple of episodes, for me, were revelatory on why the show doesn’t work: Because the central character is a void, the storytellers have to fill in the empty space with their own ideas. Here, the show flails, because in the six episodes I watched, it never commits to anything. Is Anna supposed to be a GirlBoss who takes these insulated high-society richies for a ride and almost gets away with it? Or maybe she’s a super-intelligent and super-ambitious but super-naive young woman who sees a golden opportunity to pierce the class veil and elevate herself but ends up falling short because she has the wrong background and is rejected. Or is she just a criminal, full stop, who victimizes people right and left without any feelings of guilt, and fails in the end because she got too greedy and didn’t know when to bail out? The show flirts with all of these ideas at various times, trying to find a way of making the con artist into a relatable human. A lot of the stuff about the sexism the reporter faces from her management is clearly intended to be an illuminating thematic reflection of some of these ideas, but it doesn’t align at all and winds up leaving Anna even more of a cipher. In the end, the storytellers are defeated by the slippery reality of their subject.

I don’t know if the last few episodes pull all these frustrating threads together into a coherent and satisfying thesis, bringing their blurry, fragmentary story into clear focus. My wife says they didn’t, that it stayed pretty much the same, but she has different taste and different sensibilities, so hey, it’s still possible. I’ll never find out, though, because I’m just no longer interested. Which is too bad, because if they’d abandoned the ambition at making a show about Everything and simply limited themselves to a shorter story about Something, it could have been worthwhile.

3

Addendum: My wife and I watched Bridgerton together, and we both really enjoyed it (for different reasons. We had previously tried the Shonda joint How to Get Away with Murder but didn’t care for it, but Bridgerton convinced us to give Inventing Anna a try. Oh well, we can hope the next season of Bridgerton is still good.

4

I watched Inventing Anna and found it an interesting story. The central characters of Anna, the journalist and the lawyer were well acted and penned. But Anna’s rather odd collection of friends…. If found it scarcely believable that they could have much in common or gravitate to Anna’s entitled, arrogant and unpleasant character. She must have had some sort of personal charm that appealed to each of them for any sort of friendship to develop. But we did not see much of that.

Confidence tricksters exploit some weakness in the checks and balances that are usually in place to assess credibility and authenticity. The story of Discovering Anna is how this young woman discovered how to craft an image using social media, penetrate the elite social networks and have her projects taken seriously by the movers and shakers of New York high society.

There is a cynical justification in that this is an essential skill in an ultra competitive society. The journalist and the lawyer are similarly driven. They are careerists trying to carve out some sort of success and they are so driven that the rest of their life and their relationships are strained and tense.

Anna’s friends are similarly smitten by the idea that, through utter self belief and carefully crafted image, anything is possible and they will surely get the glittering prizes and glamourous lifestyle that they crave. These people are all reflections of Anna, who is simply more adept at putting on airs and graces of a modern day princess who knows how to work the rich folks social circuit. They are all frauds to some extent. Enviously looking from the side lines at this rich folks playground and how they can catch the same wave. While the lawyer and the journalist are hard working professionals trying to elbow themselves ahead into a successful career, Anna and her friends looking for a short cut. That short cut is social media and it can be used to create a network that can deliver opportunities and investors.

The problem is that this relentless networking, which is Anna’s key skill is scarcely believable. There are only a couple of scenes where her charm in convincing financiers is believable. Most of the time, she is simply arrogant and rude, bullying hotel staff when they have the temerity to question her creditworthiness. Her friendships and their loyalty to her are not convincing.

This story is not about Anna, it is about an intrepid reporter working on a career enhancing story debunking a fake German heiress in New York society. We learn far too much about the personal and career struggles of our very pregnant reporter and not much about how the characters around Anna and how they relate to each other.

So, for me, this series was a disappointment. Netflix tend to have a problem adapting stories like this into a TV series. The writing gets stretched. The actors were fine, but their characters were not given the scenes they deserve or the opportunity to develop them.

There is a certainly a story to be told about high profile confidence tricksters. We are living in a peculiar time, where we are inundated with more media and messages than ever before. This is giving grifters and scam artists a heaven sent opportunity to find the weaknesses in a society that yearns for credible leadership. That their narcissistic posturing is taken seriously is a sad reflection on us all.

Anna’s ambition was to create a club for the elite of New York to enjoy. As such she was pretty small potatoes. Recently we have had some far more successful women scammers. Elizabeth Holmes of the Theranos scam , Dr Ruja Ignatova, the Crypto Queen scanner. The Crypto Queen has much scope for a good story. Rich folks being scammed is hardly something that is going to elicit much sympathy. But when the victims are the poorest people, that provides a moral dimension to a story. This moral element is something that ‘Inventing Anna’ conspicuously lacks. The story does not take the opportunity to build on the characters it introduced and falls flat.

It is probably not a good idea to base a story around a piece of journalism and a series of interviews by an intrepid reporter investigating stupid rich people. That is reality TV territory, not really good enough material for a drama.

5

I liked the series well enough, but I liked the original magazine article better (and it almost certainly has less fictionalized material in it). The last couple of episodes felt pretty pointless, though.

6

My wife and I are a little past halfway through this show, and after ep 1 I was kind of feeling what Cervaise says- “why exactly should I care about this con artist?”.

But we hung on and it’s gotten more interesting. There’s a little bit of subtlety going on with the question of "is she 100% a con artist in the “take the money and run” sense, or is she actually leveraging the con aspects to really try to build her foundation, in a “fake it till you make it” sense?

Weirdly, we also started watching “The Dropout” about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and there’s a very similar theme of “how much was the con artist in on their own con, and how much were they conning themselves and believing their own hype?”.

I didn’t know much about the Theranos story before we started watching The Dropout, so I found a SD thread about Holmes’ arrest. One of the posts compared her to Martin Shkreli, and I thought "that’s a coincidence, because they featured Shkreli’s character in ‘The Dropout’! Then I realized it was actually at a party Delvey attended in ‘Inventing Anna’, where the Shkreli character proudly showed off the Wu Tang album only he owned. I thought, wow, I’m getting my young female con artists all mixed up.

7

I haven’t seen the show, but thank you for the excellent review.

8

I haven’t seen this series yet, but that can’t be right - there are plenty of good character studies about con artists out there, like David Mamet’s House of Games or Stephen Frears’ The Grifters. And that’s ignoring all the great “heist” movies like The Sting, which is also about con artists. How is this series different?

9

House of Games is one of my very favorite movies. It’s also explicitly not a character study of the con artists — it’s a study of the writer/psychologist who encounters them, becomes fascinated by them, and falls in with their circle. To say more about the plot would be spoilery for those who haven’t seen it (and it’s a wonderful labyrinth of multi-layered intentions which deserves a wider audience), but the bottom line is, this is the movie that taught me that the art of the con is illuminated not by looking into the practitioner but by looking into the mark.

The Grifters is a study of Roy, the John Cusack character, who wants to be a con artist, like his mother, but who is very bad and consistently a failure at it. Note his introduction — trying to pull a simple change-raising trick, swapping bills with clumsy sleight of hand, and getting caught and beat up. His mother tells him to get out of the game, because he doesn’t have what it takes. When he meets Myra, he recognizes she’s also a con artist, and he fears her and keeps her and her plans at a distance because he worries she sees him as a mark; he knows he is not the equal of a true professional. In the end, when his mother is begging for his help, he rejects her, symbolically rejecting the life he had previously been pursuing, and it costs him dearly. This is firmly in the world of con artistry, but it works because our focus is someone who stands apart from it, who desperately wants to be one of them but who never will be.

The Sting, by contrast, can be seen as the exception that proves the rule, in that it gives us charming scammer heroes enacting an elaborate deception, full stop. It’s more of a fantasy version of con artistry, though, in that the movie is extremely careful to avoid having the “good” guys victimize any innocent marks. In the opening pigeon drop routine, the target seems to be a hapless passer-by, but he turns out to be a low-level flunky in a criminal numbers racket. The script does this very deliberately, maintaining the audience’s sympathy and allowing us to enjoy the artistry of the con by making sure all the targets are clear villains relative to the heroes. We never see the reality of the con; the only people who are hurt in the movie are people who are asking for it, in one way or another. It’s definitely a fun movie, but it doesn’t take place in the real world. In the real world, professional scammers don’t use their talents to punch up at dangerous mob bosses; they steal money with zero misgivings from gullible, easy-mark strangers.

And that’s the answer to your last question, about how Inventing Anna is different from these. It clearly started out with the belief that the person who successfully duped so many rich and powerful people for so long must be fascinating, but however many different ways they try to make this work, she remains a dead-eyed liar. The show tries to look directly at an actual real-world example of a con artist and explore her as if she’s a complex human being worthy of the attention, and it seems constantly surprised and confused to find nothing there. By contrast, House of Games and The Grifters find their complex humanity in outsider figures adjacent to the con, not in the con artists themselves. The Sting isn’t interested in complex humanity and just uses the trappings of the con in a very entertaining alternative reality.

Does this help clarify the distinction?

10

Yeah, I don’t think I’d characterize it in exactly those words, but close enough. It seemed to me like the show aspired (especially toward the end) to paint a coherent psychological profile, but failed … mostly because the show was conceived of without any clear decision on their part of how they wanted to portray her.

I think the show would have been less muddled if they’d approached it with a vision they consistently stayed true to: either decide she’s a total narcissist (which I tend to think is the correct answer), or wholeheartedly go with the picture her defense attorney tried to paint (a sincere person who perhaps made mistakes but was genuinely guided by a “fake it til you make it” philosophy, had faith that she’d succeed, and would have made good on her debts when her visions became reality).

And on that subject, I was annoyed by the words placed in the mouth of the Vivian Kent character, who says (not in these exact words, but with this exact meaning) "she can’t possibly be a sociopath because

she tried to kill herself - a sociopath would never do that."

If I may conflate sociopathy and narcissistic personality disorder for a moment, I don’t think that’s true. A completely cornered narcissist with no way out of the train wreck they’ve created WILL kill themselves if they realize things are effed up and there is absolutely no way out except to own up to their lies and take responsibility for their destructive behavior.

Of course, characters in stories can utter statements that aren’t true, but I just found it jarring that they had her say that. The show then goes on to show a scenario whereby Anna’s “suicide attempt” was a calculated ploy. That’s also very believable; a character like Anna could have done a real or faked suicide attempt at that point, I suspect. (I have no idea how much of that was made up for the Netflix series and how much provably occurred in real life.)

11

Very much so. Thank you for an excellent post.

12

Follow-up question: do you think it would have helped if they had given her an internal monologue, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange or Henry in Goodfellas? Narration is a crutch, obviously, and is often cheesy, but it is also a good way to humanize monsters.

13

My immediate response was to say No, because in my view, as noted, it’s uninteresting and repetitive to hear the con artist saying “I made up a lie, and it fooled them, and I took their money” over and over.

But then I reconsidered. The comparison to Alex in Clockwork Orange is a good one, because he’s so frequently full of shit, and the audience is making inferences about his character and his thought processes that are often directly at odds with what he’s saying and what he wants us to think about him.

So I imagine an inner monologue for Anna that’s along the lines of Holden Caulfield’s narrative voice in Catcher in the Rye. He’s a quintessential unreliable narrator; he keeps attacking and judging all the phonies around him, trying to aggrandize himself, but we read between the lines and recognize that he’s a small-minded ignorant dipshit.

You could get a lot of mileage out of doing something similar for Anna, letting her put on a narcissistic show that indirectly reveals she’s the opposite of what she says she is. She claims to be a complex thinker, but she’s actually simplistic and shallow. She belittles her high-society marks, but she’s actually desperate to be accepted in their circles. She claims to have figured out all the angles and wrapped these stupid richies around her little finger, but she can’t land her big payoffs. And so on.

The down side is, that wouldn’t work for a multi episode series like this; it would become exhausting after a couple of hours. It’d make a great movie, though, kind of a cross between Wolf of Wall Street and The Bling Ring.

14

For me, part of the appeal of the (real life magazine) story was that she was an enigma. Of course, when you fictionalize the story, you can add whatever back story and motivations to the characters that you like, but that won’t necessary improve it.