Inventing Anna (2022)
Review of Inventing Anna (2022)
Inventing Anna seemed like one of those television shows that I kind of felt morally obligated to watch. I work in entertainment journalism and all of the buzz leading up to March was the release of Inventing Anna on Netflix, and the fact that this was just the beginning to an entire trend of women in crime that actually existed in the past decade. Not too sure about romanticizing things that are still fresh wounds for many people, but more on that later.
Then, as it turns out, I had a personal connection with Miss Delvey here. My mentor, when I mentioned the show on a call, shamefully looked down and admitted that she had hung out with Anna Delvey a couple of times while still living in New York.
They had met at New York Fashion Week, and while they weren’t friends, that personal connection was there. Was I entertained by that fact? Yes. It also added some context for the show itself. Let’s begin this review.
A fake socialite scams New York City’s elite into giving her money, support, and loyalty.
While the core of the show is one mysterious Anna Delvey, the way the actual story is told and narrated is through the lens of a journalist attempting to research her. We discover that this journalist has been publicly shamed because one of her subjects lied about being wealthy and she was screwed over when he claims that she made him lie, then her editor was also majorly to blame for this fiasco.
So this disgraced journalist is eager for a second chance at something, so she is desperate for a good story. Enter: Anna Delvey. She knows something is fishy with this girl and somehow convinces her bosses to let her cover it for one month.
The journalist is also very pregnant and there is a side story where she starts to fight with her husband because the story is literally her obsession, but that’s not my focus here.
Anna Delvey’s tale is carefully constructed by the people around her, whether it’s a fashion designer set up by Anna’s boyfriend to seem like a shitty friend, a rich woman whose credit card Anna stole and charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to, or the boyfriend himself: another version of a scammer as he conned his own investors.
All we know at first is that Anna claims to be a German heiress, but as the series goes on, this story quickly begins to unravel. As she whines about her credit cards not working, she claims it must be the restaurant’s fault or that her fake father must not have sent money over in time.
The business she wants to create, lying to her friends about its location, is only created because she faked a German banker and conned a big NYC businessman into believing all of the paperwork she has done so far.
Then, at the same time, there are the friends that only hang out with Anna probably because she has wealth. The girl who works for the editorial magazine seems at awe of what Anna can and will do, so she latches on to her every word.
This leads her to getting screwed over on the famed Morocco trip, as Anna forces her to put about $70,000 in business charges to her work credit card. There’s the fitness trainer who eventually gets tired of Anna’s messes so she leaves, then there’s the poor ride or die hotel worker that befriends Anna at her workplace.
Now there must be something sketchy to begin with if this woman is living out of a hotel, because if you’ve lived in New York City, you know that the ultra-wealthy all just buy apartments, townhouses, and condos then abandon them as they home or to their summer home in, say, California.
Anna in this series really looks the part: she doesn’t look frumpy, her makeup and hair are always done, and her clothes are designer and lack any sort of wrinkles. She looks what the viewer would expect to be rich and adopts the unspoken mannerisms of the wealthy that, perhaps, fooled everyone around her.
In real life, my mentor mentioned that Anna’s accent changed every time you saw her, and that she was always seen in the same little black Zara dress wherever she went.
Looking up the real Anna Delvey on Google, she does not look like she dresses glamorously at all. That is one tick on the romanticization aspects that the show brings into this story, as well as the sympathy it exudes for her, a criminal.
We get her backstory and realize she wanted to be larger than life from her little German town and immigrant Russian parents. But then the journalist gets attached to Anna, and so does her lawyer.
They shame the editorial friend publicly in the show, and make her seem like a liar out to get money, which I didn’t find cool because it shit on someone else to make Anna look good.
The characters also fully know what she has done and yet they still only wish the finest things for her, like not going to jail, which is absolutely frustrating because this girl literally committed fraud and stole someone’s credit card.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an entertaining show, but it’s also very infuriating because of the way it sympathizes with Anna and what she has done. It’s not the same as romanticizing, for example, Ted Bundy and other various serial killers, but I honestly think it’s in a similar vein as the others.
Julia Garner is an amazing actress, as seen in shows like Ozark, but her accent was absolutely horrible in this one. I’d say watch Inventing Anna if it intrigues you and you have time, since it’s only like eight episodes, and maybe you’ll form a different opinion.
That’s the beauty in television, baby.
