Review – Inventing Anna

Shonda Rhymes starts with a magazine article about a run-of-the-mill con artist and magnifies it into a nine-part miniseries, embellishing along the way. In truth, Anna Sorokin (Julia Garner) – better known to the world as Anna Delvey – barely counts as a con artist. She ran a simple fraud scheme on some high profile New York financiers and spent a lot of time in hotels without paying. So she seems less like a gifted grifter and more like a blend of common thief and delusional child. The trouble with stretching her story from an average-length movie to more than nine hours of screen time is the complete absence of sympathetic characters. Anna herself might have made a good anti-hero, but she provokes too many uncomfortable situations; if you’ve ever had a card declined in a restaurant, she’ll treat you to plenty of chances to relive the experience. Reporter Jessica Pressler’s fictional stand-in, Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), might have seemed heroic if her obsessiveness hadn’t driven her to multiple breaches of journalists’ ethics. Everyone else – from bankers to lawyers to the sycophants who attach themselves to Anna because they think she’s rich – manage to seem loathsome just by being themselves. With no characters worth caring about, this just wasn’t engaging enough to justify its running time. Mildly amusing