Anora

What does everybody see in this? What redeemable, enjoyable value does everyone find in this caustic, ugly, and pointless movie? Somebody, tell me, please, because I do not understand at all how this has the reviews it does, how it has the esteem it does, and how it got the accolades it did. Tell me why I should care about a movie that doesn't care about its characters. "Anora's a strong female character!" I see people say. She's a modern, sympathetic, realistic portrayal of sex workers. No, Candy Land is a modern, sympathetic, realistic portrayal of sex workers. Go watch that, get yourself educated, then come back to this trash. Anora is not a strong character. She may not as insultingly false as Pretty Woman's glamorous Vivian, and she's not the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliche, but she's no symbol of pride either. She's barely a character at all. We are told nothing of her hopes and dreams, her relationship with her family, how they view her line of work, her fears, or how and why she got into being a prostitute and a stripper. The movie tells the audience NOTHING, and only gives the slightest bit of information to infer anything. We know she's loud, short-tempered, profane, and, in direct contrast to everyone who says she's some positive portrayal of sex workers, she is ashamed of what she does. That's not headcanon; that's right from the movie, when she flips out over any mention of being a prostitute, and when she says to Ivan's mother "then why did your son marry a whore to piss you off?". That, and the final scene -- the only moment of genuine beauty and character development to be found in this trash, and it's the final 30 seconds -- are the only definitive shreds of making Anora the character be anything less than a shrill sketch of an insulting caricature. And if your lead character, who is also your titular character, is wholly lacking in depth, then what hope is there for anybody else? None. All the young people are shallow, self-absorbed Gen-Z mockeries, living for self-indulgence and hedonism and nothing else. Anora's husband's family is so cliche in their portrayal -- the closed-ranks, honor-first, outsiders-be-damned Russian stereotype -- that it borders on racist. With that bedrock of absolute garbage characters, we come to the movie itself. The first third of its Baron Harkonnen-levels of bloated run time for its meager story is watching Gen-Z'ers alternate between spring break for the rich and a softcore porn. If it is meant to be romantic, that we get swept away in how Anora and Ivan connect while Ivan is paying her to be his girlfriend and a hurricane of sex, drugs, and terrible club music, all while tormenting regular people and get away with it because they're rich, it fails miserably. There is nothing endearing about it whatsoever, not even by accident. I can't believe I'm about to give credit here, but at least Spring Breakers understood the assignment; hedonism was the entire point of the movie there, and the ones who found it too much fell off. Anora thinks there's something to be found in the hedonism, whether it be some sick love story or some 4-D chess-level metaphor, but it never develops anything regular people can see. It's just young people being terrible, giving us no reason to like any of them, and then expecting the audience to want to continue on the journey of the unlikely marriage to come from it. And then Anora spirals into grating, repetitive madness. So much screaming. So, so, so much screaming. The endless repetition of trying to find Ivan when he runs away. Anora dropping the F-bomb three times in a nine-word sentence. I checked the timer to see how much of this intolerable crap was left in the middle of the search for Ivan, and there was still 55 minutes. If I wasn't committed to watching every Best Picture winner, I would've quit. There is no character development here. The movie's visual action has movement, but the story itself slips into a coma as Anora is abducted by people from her husband's family who want to annul the marriage, and dragged around town all day and night, going through what has to be ten different locations, looking for him. Ivan's godfather asking random passers-by if they've seen him. There is nothing gained or achieved in this exhaustive sequence. There is no exploration of Anora here, no deeper meaning to her motivations, no reflections to be found on her emotions at the time; she just swears and screams and resists with futility as the search drags on. And when they finally find Ivan, we move into the final stretch: the "comedic" shenanigans of the family trying to get the marriage annulled. More yelling and arguing. More insufferable characters get added in Ivan's parents. Ivan either reveals his cowardice or that he never cared for Anora to begin with, somehow becoming even less likeable than he already was, and he was already hovering around levels usually reserved for MLM salespeople. Anora, as a movie, is not some new frontier for the portrayal of sex workers; it is the same old shame with a Gen-Z coat of paint. It is not a love story; Anora, in fact, hates its characters, and tortures us while it tortures them. And it is not a character study, because it offers no character worthwhile in which to study. Anora's redeeming qualities -- its occasional lapses into comedy, and the touching final thirty seconds -- are not enough to make up for a movie so barren in character development, so pointless in its story "arc", and so abrasive in its delivery. Anora doesn't respect its characters, its titular character's work, or your time as a viewer. If you want to see attractive people be nude and have sex, PornHub is a thing. If you want to hear arguing, find a political podcast. But if you actually expect your movies to treat you with respect and give you something worth watching, Anora is a waste of time. It is one of those plastic kiddie pools when it's still on the rack at Target; shallow, empty, and pointless.