Inventing Anna

Inventing Anna is the perfect Shondaland series in that it is incredibly fun to watch but filled with issues. The first is star Julia Garner’s divisive accent. ... If you can get past that, though, Inventing Anna is undeniably engrossing.

Even with an occasionally clunky script, Inventing Anna is ridiculously watchable, aided in part by another scene-stealing performance from Julia Garner and a top-notch ensemble.

This is a show for those mainly looking to marvel – at the effrontery, the style, the steel nerves of the twentysomething weaving webs from inside a house of cards built on thin ice. Those who are looking for an in-depth, analytical take on the Delvey phenomenon, her pathology or motivations – which the handful of previous documentaries about her have lacked – will have to wait a little longer. ... Julia Garner is mesmerising as Anna.

The results are occasionally messy and often unwieldy — most of its nine episodes clock in at over an hour each — but they’re also savvy, sly and compulsively watchable.

Any time Garner’s Anna is off screen, the series loses a bit of steam. I suppose it’s inevitable that a story about a phony heiress feels a little hollow… but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.

The modesty of its thematic and narrative ambitions keep Inventing Anna from being a great show. It could have been truly great if it had decided to really be about something, but instead it's content to just be fun. It knows what it is and succeeds at what it sets out to do.

An entertaining if overlong look into the mind of a chic, haughty sociopath. The accent is unsettling, and mysterious, and fascinating, just like the woman employing it. I’m not sure the show — which is fictionalized — quite gets at what led Anna to commit her crimes, psychologically or otherwise.

The series isn’t perfect, but at its best, “Inventing Anna” tells a story that, especially when staying close to real episodes involving Anna and those around her, is entertainingly, jaw-droppingly outrageous.

Typical Netflix series bloat disappointments aside, “Inventing Anna” is a pretty engrossing ride largely due to Chlumsky’s relatability and Garner’s bonkers accent.

Rhimes brings in familiar faces from other Shondaland shows, travels to exotic places, has Anna strut about in all manner of glitzy outfits — Anna loves to shop — and generally offers up solid modern TV entertainment. But a tighter, more succinct work would have lived up to Garner’s performance.

Like too many streaming series, it trades in efficiency and force for length and reduced churn. Still, there’s a lot to chew on, including a handful of delicacies yet to be so earnestly unearthed in all those other stories of the rich and famous.

Despite its more evocative performances, Inventing Anna demands patience that doesn’t pay off, squandering its promising potential along the way.

“Inventing Anna” isn’t a tough watch. The actors do a lot to compensate for what’s missing. But it’s overly devoted to the Vivian part of the story. If anything, I found myself wishing Alexis Floyd’s Neff could somehow spin off her own series, right in the middle of this one.

Chlumsky does her best with the routine role of the disheveled, suspecting journalist, but while Vivian’s relationship with her dismissive editor, Paul (Tim Guinee), gestures at workplace issues like sexism, her subplot is comparatively flimsy, and conspicuously feels like just a framing device for Anna’s backstory.

Unfortunately, the series spends nearly as much time with another Anna: Anna Chlumsky, in an overwrought performance as the journalist desperate to tell Anna's story. [14 - 27 Feb 2022, p.6]

This might not be the Anna Delvey drama we expected. It’s more trash than grit, though undeniably enjoyable. As a true crime Gossip Girl, it’s a fun, slick joyride. But once you try to take it as seriously as her crimes, it’s hard to see Inventing Anna as anything other than a very expensive Anna Delvey PR campaign.

In treating Anna with a shrug, Inventing Anna never quite justifies its own existence. Instead, it strings its viewers along with the possibility of reaching some profound revelation, but in the end, it’s a knockoff posing as couture.

[“Inventing Anna” is] rife with great performances, and devoid of writing to match. ... If “Inventing Anna” possesses any relevance at all, it’s due to the quality of its cast. Julia Garner is disturbingly flawless as Anna Delvey.

Delvey’s story is riveting. The series, sadly, is not. It’s five hours too long and far too formulaic to keep up with its brazen protagonist, played here by “Ozark’s” Julia Garner. But for all its problems, it’s hard to stop watching “Inventing Anna”.

A bit of a slog — a series that seeks to be a little too inventive for its own good.

Garner and Chlumsky—along with Arian Moayed as Delvey’s attorney, Todd Spodek, and Alexis Floyd, playing Delvey’s hotel concierge BFF Neffatari “Neff” Davis—seem to be in a much better show than what Inventing Anna turns out to be.

[Arian Moayed's] scenes with Garner in the 82-minute (!) finale, which focuses on Anna's trial, are electric — the few moments Inventing Anna lives up to its promise. The rest of the time, the series feels like one extremely long con.

Garner fully commits to the role without missing its comedic beats. She seems to both be steeped in Anna’s world and ironically to the side of it—in a series that is often flattened by its formal mediocrity, hers is an excellent performance.

Her haute/hilarious accent is both irritating and irresistible. So is a lot of the dialogue, but the series is constantly winking at its audience. The structures are formulaic, the hip-hop soundtrack is intrusive and wrong; the effort to fashion Anna into some kind of feminist martyr is shameless.

Rhimes never sufficiently explores the common psychological elements that the journalist and her subject share in a way that could add meaning on the story. It's the opposite: her thin rendering of each relationship to the other feeds the show's other significant flaws.

The stretched out, heavily padded “Inventing Anna” works as a clichéd morality tale but stumbles badly as a piece of storytelling — more invention and incident means less coherence and less consistent characterization.

There’s a disconnect between the fantasy lavish life that Anna lived, as we see it on screen, and the labored pursuit to piece together the puzzle of her crimes. This is never successfully bridged in a way that has you invested wholly in either Vivian or Anna, or even fully understanding their respective motivations.

Inventing Anna careens all over the place, and one of its only consistencies is an exhausting insistence that Delvey was talented but misunderstood.

[Inventing Anna] takes this fascinating story of a con artist who scammed Manhattan society and breezes through it with all the depth of an Emily in Paris episode.

Inventing Anna is an unnecessarily melodramatic, bulky, one-note take on one of the most interesting stories to come out of the 2010s and a real let-down.

It’s an overly long muddle, never quite sure what it wants to say about its title character, or how to say it.

While it may make for serviceable background noise if there’s nothing else on, “Inventing Anna” is painfully lacking in self–awareness: a con that savvy viewers would be smart to skip.