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Inventing Anna’s Williams, who wrote a first-person account (and later book) about getting stuck with the Morocco bill, has the same name, university, job, hair and words in Vanity Fair as the real Williams, whom the show paints as a self-victimizing, opportunistic hanger-on who profited off Anna’s story. It feels problematic to adjust the journalist character with some elements of Pressler’s story – Pressler was also pregnant when reporting the piece, and was also the author of a retracted story, though the mistake didn’t hang over her career as it does Vivian’s – but then keep Williams’s characteristics consistent. When most of the other characters have real counterparts, and the details of the story are well known, why invent a journalist character? And why make the journalist bad at her job and borderline unethical? (Vivian, who in the show appears to view Anna as somewhat of a feminist antihero, lies to her boss, ignores assignments, and most egregiously, offers to help the defense team.) The framing of the Anna Delvey story, which in the show is peppered with identifying details, characterizations and real names, through a fictional-ish journalist is questionable, distracting. Julia Garner, left, and Anna Chlumsky in Inventing Anna. Each of the nine episodes focuses on someone tricked by Anna – her ex-boyfriend, the lawyer she retains for her club, her trainer, ex-best friend Rachel Deloache Williams, whom she stuck with a $62,000 bill in Morocco – as refracted through Vivian’s understanding of Anna and her personal motivations to nail the story. But it’s Vivian Kent, loosely based on Pressler, who tells the story. Anna gets the first word: “This whole story, the one you are about to sit on your fat ass and watch like a big lump of nothing, is about me,” she says. Inventing Anna acknowledges the popularity of this story from the jump: the first shot is of magazines rolling off the press, the now canonical (to media people) lead image recreated with Garner.
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(Pressler, whose work also inspired the film Hustlers, is a producer on the series.) And there’s the source material: the 2018 New York magazine article by Jessica Pressler, which quickly became one of the most-read of the year and a surefire bet in the by-then churning article-to-screen pipeline. There’s Julia Garner, the breakout star of Netflix’s Ozark, transforming into Anna – perpetual scowl, bracingly harsh accent from nowhere. There’s the creator: Rhimes, the master of the modern soap opera, adapting a true story for the first time. You’d be hard pressed to find a show with more reliably interesting attention hooks than Inventing Anna. Like Nine Perfect Strangers, last year’s buzzy Hulu show with similarly flashy parts (Nicole Kidman in a wig, sinister wellness culture), Inventing Anna is at once overlong and underwhelming – a disappointing, intriguing misfire. It’s an attempted meditation on fact and fiction whose blurring of the two obscures the heady, perpetually compelling mix in the art of the scam – why someone lies, why people believe them, the heaps of denial and cognitive dissonance needed to sustain both. In a confounding choice, Inventing Anna buries its sharpest hook – the scammer and those who accommodated, even benefited from, her charades through New York – into the somewhat fictionalized story of how a journalist, Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), pieces together her grift in an effort to rescue her career from a devastating journalistic mistake.
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Its curious blurring of fact and fiction will lead many viewers to Google the real thing, and left me scratching my head. This nod at Anna Delvey’s genuinely stupefying nerve – to fund her self-named arts club (the “new Soho House”), based entirely on lies and zero assets, she applied for a $40m loan (!!) – ends up being more revealing of the show itself.