Inventing Anna: Truth and Consequences

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, Arian Moayed as Todd, and Anthony Edwards as Alan put in especially memorable performances in this unique memorable series.

Bridgerton: Alternate Austen

My wife and I binge-watched Bridgerton the past two nights, and loved it.  She's a devoted Shonda Rhimes fan, and has watched and is watching everything she's done on network television.   I can take or leave these shows, and usually leave them.  But I'm also a big Jane Austen fan, and enjoy historical drama, so I gave Bridgerton a try.

It does have a lot in common with Jane Austen's novels, taking place in the Regency era in England, but it has a bold alternate history element: people of color are in the aristocracy, including Simon aka the Duke of Hastings (one of the two leading characters) and Queen Charlotte.  Actually, historians have been debating for at least fifty years about whether Charlotte had African ancestry -- see the 1761 portrait by Allan Ramsay -- so that part of Bridgerton is more aptly described as controversial history not alternate history.  But Simon's character, along with other secondary characters in Bridgerton, is clearly alternate history, which is a plus in my book.

The other way in which Austen's novels differ from Bridgerton -- based on the series of best-selling novels by Julia Quinn over the past twenty years (which I haven't read) -- is the hot sex between Simon and Daphne Bridgerton that lights up several episodes.  Simon's lust for Daphne, which he has to mediate with his vow (to his father) not to have children, in age in which the withdrawal method is by and large the only way to do that, is one of the fulcrums of the narrative, and is presented just short of graphically but effectively on the screen.  And I'll say that the acting of both Phoebe Dynevor as Daphne and Regé-Jean Page as Simon was superb across a wide range of tempestuous and profound emotions,

The other notable element in Bridgerton is Whistedown (voice by Julie Andrews), a Regency gossip columnist who stirs the pot with her all-too-savvy reports.  Her true identity is not revealed until the very end, and though my wife and I pretty much guessed it, it was still fun to see this played out.

The secondary characters and stories were well done, the cinematography was just gorgeous, and I'm glad there's a second season already in the works.   Check back here in 2021 for the review.