2025 | rated R | starring Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler, Phoebe Dynevor, Madeline Brewer, Zoey Deutch, Dylan O’Brien, McKenna Grace | directed by Jan Kosama | 1 hr 51 mins | 2 out of 5 stars |
Movies aren’t journalism. They don’t have an obligation to express all sides of an issue and it is preferred for a filmmaker to present only “one side” of a particular subject as a catalyst for their story from their perspective. Many movies that I love I also don’t agree with their foundational philosophy being presented. Every once in a while, however, being so myopically focused on one angle of a subject can produce holes in the story that work against it – and then we start to have problems, and the story starts to unwind. Even if you fundamentally agree with the theme or message, the movie’s holes start to grow wider and wider until the Spidey senses start to tingle that something isn’t adding up.
That’s what happens in Anniversary, a family melodrama that opens on the wedding anniversary of Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul (Kyle Chandler) Taylor and family get-together that celebrates it. They’re an affluent family with Paul a celebrity chef and Ellen an ivy league professor. They have three children: Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) an environmental lawyer, Anna (Madeline Brewer, always good) a stand-up comic, Birdie (McKenna Grace), still in college for animal science and Josh (Dylan O’Brien) who brings his new fiancé Liz (Phoebe Dynevor) to meet the family this year. Ellen recognizes Liz from one of her classes, as a student who steadfastly wrote a politically incendiary paper that Ellen found offensive, a paper Liz has now turned into a book called “The Change”, a book that will start a movement that rips apart their family, as it does the entire country.
Anniversary functionally gets away with having a massive donut hole in the center of it that the entire plot hinges on because of its admittedly novel structure. We see this family and this world only in their house and through time jumps to the next family gathering over the course of 5 years. As a family drama it’s fun to suddenly smash cut to a year later, see all the changes that happened off screen and figure out where everyone is now. From a story perspective, these time jumps trace the authoritarian rise of a political movement inspired by Liz’s book and the slow degradation of the country, with this house as a microcosm for it.
However, this is a movie that wants to get the credit for being a sharp political movie without actually being specifically political. We don’t know what The Change is. This book is scholarly tome, thicker than an encyclopedia. It must be a thousand pages, we don’t hear a word from it and it has somehow captivated the country. We learn that whatever it proposes a) believes the current 2-party system is broken and seeks to unite the country under other common ideas, b) it believes the previous generation “screwed everything up” in a way that presents the conflict as less left vs right and more generational (Anna’s left-leaning lesbian girlfriend is a big fan of The Change) and c) it seems to be sponsored by a mega corporation and carried out by the US military. But the ideas in it, what its diagnosis of the country’s problems and prescribed solution for them isn’t stated even once.
The movie actually can’t state them because if it did some in the audience might go for it and otherwise would pick apart the details of the logic. They just want you accept it out of pure emotion. The Change is a true McGuffin, not the modern internet definition of a McGuffin that is just the object that motivates the plot, but a true Hitchcockian McGuffin in that it’s a thing that motivates the plot and it ultimately doesn’t matter. Yet, in this case it should matter because everything we see happen to this family is an outgrowth of something the audience isn’t privy too and that happens off screen between time jumps. That’s the thing that’s kind of annoying about Anniversary. It wants to get all the credit for its “sharp political satire”, but isn’t smart enough or doesn’t want to do the legwork to actually work through the ideas and build the world that this pre-dystopian story is screaming for it to build. This movie could have been a fascinating extended dialog exchange about authoritarianism and instead it wants to go the least interesting, least inventive and most emotionally manipulative way. Just leave it to our imagination, I guess. Bad thing is happening by bad people for bad reason.
And boy does it. Anniversary becomes a symphony of misery porn in its 2nd half, with Anna becoming an enemy of the state for telling a joke, Cynthia’s marriage blowing up (Daryl McCormack as Cynthia’s husband has the film’s most arresting scene and the only time the movie dares to have another opinion on something), Birdie being radicalized and Ellen being publicly humiliated. From a political standpoint it’s all painted with broad stokes. This movie deploys the unnamed but age-old trope of identifying a left-leaning character as nothing more than a caring activist. Cynthia cares about the environment, we’re going to ignore that this supposed anti-authoritarian would have called the police on you for not wearing a mask in your backyard in 2020. 60 years ago a Nazi was presented as such by being in full Nazi regalia, in Anniversary Dylan O’Brien goes full Nazi by dressing well and having slicked-back hair. Kyle Chandler’s Paul is the last hold-out. The guy that tries to stay neutral and just keep everyone civil at the dinner table for as long as possible. Until he succumbs to the drama. If we didn’t like Chandler so much as an actor, his “Name the Dog” outburst in the third act would be mocked and memed right alongside Nicholas Cage in The Wicker Man. It’s embarrassing. I felt bad for most everyone here, not in the way the movie wants me to but as actors having to delivery these lines.
Ultimately, there is a huge blind spot sitting at the center of this movie where a debate would be. It doesn’t want to have that debate because it wants to get to its authoritarian police state third act and can’t think of the idea seeds that would need to be planted to create this. It can’t say, for example, why abolishing the 2-party system wouldn’t create multiple parties instead of a single party rule. But there is so little intellectually on the bone here that I wouldn’t even be able to speculate about what’s in The Change and why people love it and hate it. Anyone that does (like Rogerebert.com’s ridiculously glowing review) is applying something to the film that isn’t there. Anniversary isn’t a movie about ideas; it’s a manipulative exercise in pure emotion. Most cynically, Anniversary can be taken as a fully-loaded defense against the idea that the older political generation has screwed things up for the younger generation, suggesting the people who screwed things up couldn’t have possibly done anything wrong and any attempt by the younger generation to correct it would end in disaster. Trust your elders.
This is one hell of a cast and a potentially dark, scathing, lightening rod of a premise that gets squandered under a family melodrama that gets increasingly desperate and absurd as it goes. Poetically, it wants you to just buy into that emotional blackmail and blindly go along with it – the same way it is criticizing people who blindly go along with The Change. Whatever that is.