2024 | rated R | starring Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian | written & directed by Sean Baker | 2h 19m | 3 1/2 out of 5 |
Season 8 Finale
In writer/director Sean Baker’s most accessible and crowd-pleasing film to date, the director of Tangerine and The Florida Project takes his characters who struggle on the margins of society, the poor and the somewhat degenerate, and turns them into heroes in a genre mob movie that works both as a character piece and a fun bit of live-wire chaos cinema.
Anora (Mikey Madison) is a stripper and an escort in Brooklyn, NY who meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) the son of a wealthy Russian mob family. Ivan pays for Ani to move in with him for a week, at the end of which he proposes to her and the two have a Vegas wedding. When news of the marriage reaches Ivan’s father, he sends a trio of goons lead by his uncle Toros (Karren Karagulian) to bring Ivan back and annul the marriage.
Anora has a simple premise that becomes secondary to the movie as a character study of Anora herself. As it goes on everything else becomes irrelevant to peeling back the layers of what makes this young escort tick. Does she really love this guy or is she using him to move up in the world? Can she only express love through sex? How did she get so tough to a point where she can go toe-to-toe with hardened mobsters. As Baker steers this movie – thankfully – away from a Pretty Woman style love story and into this character piece, he puts the entire thing on the back of Mikey Madison, who responds with an emotional tour de force that runs the gauntlet in the films’ running time, but most importantly in keeping Anora something of an enigma. It’s a lot of fun to watch Anora aligning with the mobsters, first to find her husband and then in realizing he may not have been what she thought, but it’s also compelling to wonder why – does she actually love him and is broken-hearted or does she feel conned by someone she would normally do the conning to? It’s rich stuff and Madison elevates this movie to being as good as it is almost single handedly. If you haven’t seen her before, you’ve missed out on Better Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Scream V.
For my money, Baker has a pacing problem with Anora. This movie is overly long and indulgent, something I normally like in auteur films, but here it feels like that indulgences are mis-applied. The first act of the movie – the first hour of it – focuses on the sex-fueled week the two have and, while I like seeing adult experiences back in movies, this goes on absolutely forever and does almost nothing to establish their relationship. For Ivan it’s nothing more than sex and video games. For Anora, it’s a big house, mink coats and social status.
The movie takes a turn for the better in the 2nd act, when the mobsters crash into the film. From there it’s a chaotic work of comic energy sustained over another hour or so. Karagulian is absolutely hilarious as the frustrated, end-of-his-rope Toros who is forced to run around Long Island, barging into restaurants and clubs while Anora bickers with his henchmen. Suddenly we’re in a mob movie and all the Italian mafia tropes are liberally deployed to very funny effect. If you’re like me and like the bickering, realistic, overlapping dialog-driven comedy of shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or The Sopranos, it’s incredibly entertaining.
It winds down again in the third act to focus back on our heroine, revealing how irrelevant Ivan was to this story in a tragic way. The ending is damn near perfect and so is the performance that combusts in it. Anora is an excellent character study with a lead performance that sells it inside a movie that is indulgent, sometimes hilariously so, sometimes gratuitously so, in the name of creating a wild ride. I was with it for about half of the ride.
Post-Script: Anora would go on to win 5 Oscars including Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards, a bizarre choice and another in a line of the Academy rewarding quirky indie films and trying to create a hipper more youthful image (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Parasite). It’s enough to create a future backlash, which Anora is both better than and not as good as the hype, however I will stand by Mikey Madison winning Best Actress. For me, the best performance of the year isn’t the person who cried the most, threw the dishes off the table or had the best period accent, it’s the person who elevates the movie, that makes it worth watching because of their involvement and she certainly does that in this film.