In 2018, a sharp-tongued snob with a designer wardrobe and a penchant for $400-a-night hotel stays briefly became an unlikely folk hero. The long trail of unpaid bills left behind by Anna Delvey (nee Sorokin) across Manhattan was traced by journalist Jessica Pressler in a New York Magazine article that quickly went viral, not least because so many of those tabs were from the kinds of establishments where, as soon as most of us were to enter, we’d be discreetly informed that we absolutely could not afford the services on offer.
The 20-something Delvey, who claimed to be a German heiress about to come into a head-spinning fortune, wasn’t accused of distressing patients with inaccurate medical diagnoses, like Elizabeth Holmes, or wiping out the life savings of close friends, like Bernie Madoff. Most of her deceptions were small yet cinematic: It was fun to idly imagine that, with expensive-enough clothes and the right mix of savvy and gall, we too could name-drop our way into high society, even if we might ultimately lack Delvey’s nerve to “borrow” a private jet to go meet Warren Buffett.
In any case, how much smarter could our social betters be if they fell for such an obvious grifter? The Anna Delvey story was delicious because it was generously spiced with schadenfreude, illustrating how the elites who believe themselves to be the center of the universe were had by little more than their own reflexive snootiness turned against them.
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In contrast, “Inventing Anna,” Netflix’s new miniseries about Delvey’s exploits around town, is about as flavorful as a box of Cheerios. Created by Shonda Rhimes, the nine-part drama stars Julia Garner as the fictionalized Anna, with the actor sporting a singular accent that’s supposed to be somewhere between German and Russian. (Overhearing the show, my husband noted that she sounded more like a yowling cat suddenly cursed with human speech.) Still, the character dutifully serves as a vehicle for all the things that viewers already familiar with Delvey’s rap sheet would expect from a big-budget dramatization: makeovers, fabulous settings, mean-girl comments (“you look poor”), all-around delusional behavior.
The frills are fine; it’s everything else that’s the problem. “Inventing Anna” places at its center its least interesting character: writer Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), who intuits that the just-jailed Anna would make a compelling subject for a piece, but can’t convince her editors that they should let her pursue the story. Vivian is based on Pressler, who also got a fictional counterpart in the film “Hustlers,” another adaptation of her work. But that character, played by Julia Stiles, was mostly a framing device, whereas Vivian is a seven-months-pregnant recalcitrant determined to publish the piece that’ll restore her reputation after a journalism scandal demoted her to office pariah. It’s a Sisyphean task to get us to care as much about the writing of an article as the escapades of the person being written about, and neither the series nor a surprisingly depthless Chlumsky succeeds in doing so.
Vivian isn’t merely a point-of-entry character; her professional setbacks leave her ambivalent-to-anxious about her impending motherhood, and her cringe-inducing journalistic transgressions earn her the antiheroine label. (I’d venture that Vivian is about as realistic a reporter as the horny doctors are on Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”)
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“Inventing Anna” needs Vivian to keep asking the questions that get to the heart of the title character: where she came from, what she wants, whom she screwed over and why at least one of her former friends (an excellent Alexis Floyd) is still so loyal to her. Approximately half the show is told via flashbacks to Anna’s larger scheme: to secure a loan for tens of millions of dollars so she can found her personal utopia. Naturally, then, the show drags whenever the focus turns back to Vivian, her umpteenth fight with her resentful husband (Anders Holm) and her inexplicable admiration for a phony working one of the oldest tricks in the book.
“Scandal,” another Rhimes show, took as its cynical ethos the endless malleability of reality. Its central fixer, Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope, regularly massaged the truth to make it palatable to the American citizenry. Vivian offers to do something similar for Anna: to revise her public image from that of a wannabe socialite, as an earlier tabloid story presented her, to an ambitious and hard-working young woman who just wanted her piece of the American Dream. But there are no stakes here; we already know she’s a con artist, so what’s the point of quibbling over the content of her character?
One of the most promising themes at the start of “Inventing Anna” is the idea that a scammer could be outwardly indistinguishable from any number of bright young things faking it 'til they make it. Fraudsters Martin Shkreli and Billy McFarland — both currently in prison — were real-life acquaintances of Delvey, and versions of them (played by actors) make up part of Anna’s New York. (The actual Delvey joined them behind bars, serving nearly 21 months of a 4- to 12-year prison sentence and is currently facing deportation to Germany.)
But the series’ maximalist approach ultimately fails to illuminate who Anna is or put forth a convincing theory of her motivations. (Scammer narratives are often anticlimactic this way. Their outlandish transgressions rarely match up with their often ordinary backgrounds and desires.) Each episode runs an hour or more — and boy, do you feel it — but there are too many characters, too many story lines and too many ineffectual stabs at meaning for any of them to really land. Among the least persuasive of the show’s half-baked arguments: that Anna would’ve had better luck in securing a $40 million loan with no collateral had she been a man.
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Familiar faces from Rhimes’s previous shows — Kate Burton, Katie Lowes, Jeff Perry and Anna Deavere Smith — populate the series but are given relatively little to do. Laverne Cox and Arian Moayed round out the cast as Anna’s former personal trainer and current lawyer, respectively, and only one of them seems smart enough to ensure that they’ll be paid for their services.
“Inventing Anna” aims for a mosaic portrait of the character from the many different people who’ve discarded or been discarded by her: friends, lovers, business partners, service workers. There’s a seed of a fascinating idea there, of the panoply of transactional relationships Anna not only had, but was almost expected to have as a hobnobber among the upper classes. That’s fundamentally the nature of the relationship between Anna and Vivian, too, a fact that the veteran journalist keeps conveniently forgetting because the only way the writers seem to know how to rev up her character is to make her perpetually terrible at her job.
It’s something of a relief that “Inventing Anna” has more of a proletarian touch than Pressler’s write-up, that we get some sense of how many working stiffs’ jobs and reputations the real-life Delvey imperiled by living on other people’s grudging or unwitting largesse. We get glimpses, too, of the sides of Anna that emerge when the mask slips, or the threats that she resorts to when all else fails.
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But in most other respects, especially when it’s sloganeering about, for instance, “the swindle that is the American Dream in the 21st century,” a series as intellectually empty, structurally disjointed and just badly written as “Inventing Anna” can’t help feeling like a con, too — the fraud of boldface names, hyped-up marketing and cultural bandwagonning to convince us that it’s saying something worthy of our time and attention, when it never really feels like it’s about anything at all.
Inventing Anna (nine episodes) premieres Friday on Netflix.
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