I’ve been sick for the last week. I caught the latest cold my children were nice enough to bring me from school, so I’ve had little else to do but watch television. I settled on Inventing Anna, a miniseries about a fake German heiress who snookered the fabulously wealthy in New York. The opening credits set the tone: “This story is completely true. Except for the parts that are totally made up,” it warns.
Those of us who live in middle-class America think that there must be something special about the 1% who live on Park Avenue. They went to Ivy League schools and they make enormous piles of money, so they must be smarter than most, right? Maybe not.
Journalist Jessica Pressler at New York Magazine broke the story of con artist Anna Delvey, which was turned into a mini-series. Pressler was played by the constantly grimacing Anna Chlumsky—best known for her role in My Girl opposite Macaulay Culkin—as Vivian Kent.
Chlumsky’s performance was as distracting as the weird accent that Julia Garner chose to use for her character of Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress. But while the accent is off-putting, it’s much more forgivable because Delvey was actually a Russian pretending to have a German accent, so she sounds bizarre in real life. Garner nailed it. But Chlumsky’s facial gymnastics go beyond hard-to-watch and into mime territory. Chlumsky always appears to be acting for the back row, contorting her face into various expressions of fear, horror, and desperation.
What is going on with Anna Chlumsky's facial expressions? Is she miming something? Why was this allowed? It was distracting AF #InventingAnna pic.twitter.com/caDGJWNg8F
— No, not THAT Megan Fox 🦊 (@MeganFoxWriter) February 15, 2022
The worst it ever got was in episode eight when Vivian Kent is tracking down Delvey’s father in Germany and she tip-toes down a cobbled street outside the man’s house trying not to be heard. It’s exactly like watching a mime trying to portray sneaking. I would like to ask director David Frankel why no one gave Chlumsky better direction than “just act it out like you’re in a bad improv class!” On top of the ridiculous overacting, they gave Chlumsky the worst storyline of a pregnant journalist who treats her husband terribly, ignores the fact that she’s pregnant in order to “get the story,” and pushes everything important out of her life in order to get close to a sociopathic trickster. Let’s hope that was a part of the story that was “completely made up,” according to the opening credits.
Chlumsky’s bad performance aside, the obligatory Trump hate was also distracting and unnecessary. This story took place during Trump’s presidency, and so I would have forgiven one anti-Trump joke in the newsroom of “Manhattan Magazine”— which was actually New York Magazine — but we didn’t get just one. Oh no! There were at least six sprinkled throughout the season to remind you who the cool people are. (Psssst….you’re not one of them.)
It never fails to surprise me how little directors of television and entertainment care about what half their audience thinks. They are not concerned at all about offending or upsetting 50% of their audience. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing else to watch and so we are a captive audience who will just sit through whatever it is they shovel our way, but it’s getting tiresome. We know New York “journalists” hate Trump. We get it. We don’t need a scene in every episode reminding us of that fact. But the writers think we do, and so you will get numerous digs at the former president including one really stupid breathless line delivered by a journalist with Trump Derangement Syndrome: “Trump’s trying to destroy our democracy!”
Beyond the low-IQ Trump-bashing and Chlumsky’s painful acting, Julia Garner’s performance makes the series worth watching. Best known for her role in Ozark as the spunky Ruth Langmore, Garner shines as the caustic but clever Anna Delvey. Alexis Floyd as Neffatari Davis (Neff), the concierge at 11 Howard who became fast friends with Delvey, also gives a wonderful performance.
What stands out the most after watching this series and reading the real accounts as written by Jessica Pressler is the mind-twisting outrageousness that this con artist got so close to taking an American bank for 40 million dollars. All it took was getting to know the right people. And those people would check the boxes that shouldn’t be checked and give assurances that shouldn’t have been assured, all because Delvey knew someone they knew and trusted. Who knew the barons of Wall Street were such easy marks?
Fyre Fest, a famous prank on the super-wealthy who thought they were going to a posh festival on an island and ended up stranded with stale bread and no porta-potties, was another scam happening in New York at the same time Delvey was making her rounds and gathering investors for her fictional foundation. I never figured out exactly what it was Delvey said she was building, but it sounded like a cross between a private drinking club and an art gallery with restaurants run by the owner of Nobu. Delvey managed to get everyone who was anyone signed onto her fictional project. At the same time, she was stiffing hotels with $30,000 to $65,000 bills. That was another revelation. Did you know you could just promise a hotel a “wire transfer” of money from overseas and then run up a $65,000 bill?
It’s all so hard to believe that if we didn’t know it actually happened it would be one of those movies where you think, “that could never happen.”
Overall it was entertaining enough for me to keep watching, but Chlumsky’s performance got worse and worse with each episode and the only reason to keep clicking play was to find out what happened to Anna Delvey. The viewer did not need the endless storyline focused on the journalist and all her issues. A source lied to her once and her reputation is ruined! She’s having a baby but she can’t have the baby until her reputation is repaired! The whole thing felt contrived and is probably the made-up part of the story, and we can tell. First of all, no journalist who works for a big magazine gets her reputation ruined over a fake story. The faker it is, the bigger the job promotion! See Maggie Haberman at the New York Times. Haberman won a Pulitzer for her work on the fake Trump/Russia collusion stories. The idea that one kid lying to a reporter could do damage to her career was laughable. If making up a scandal between your country and Russia can’t hurt your career, then some dumb kid faking some stock winnings won’t touch it either.
According to Den of Geek, Pressler “had in fact misreported a story in 2014, [but] she wasn’t as discredited as the show paints her to be. In 2015, she published the New York Magazine article that would become the basis for the film Hustlers, which got her a nomination for National Magazine Award the following year. Her article on Anna came out in 2018.” Some disgrace! This person has more film credits than Anna Chlumsky. They love to paint themselves as victims, though, don’t they?
Pressler wrote about how Delvey got the attention of the elite:
Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not? Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Company into a manila envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.
I can recommend Inventing Anna for the crazy story while also warning you that the acting choices by Chlumsky are going to mystify you and take you right out of the moment while you sit there wondering how she made it past the screen test. And now that you know Pressler’s background, you’ll probably wish Anna Delvey had taken Vivian Kent for a few hundred thousand too. In the end, there wasn’t anyone in this storytelling to feel sorry for except perhaps Neff, one of the only people in it with no means or cushion to fall back on when Delvey’s scam came tumbling down. The rest of them should have known better and got what they deserved.
Watch the trailer here:
