Anora (Baker, 2024) & A Real Pain (Eisenberg, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

When I was living in New York City, I worked at a cinema called the Alamo Drafthouse, and I worked Christmas Day and Boxing Day. These were days treated with trepidation and anxiety by the staff, because of the intense influx of customers honouring the tradition of non-religious New Yorkers come holiday season – bypass the family gathering, order Chinese food and watch a movie. To my mind, this is the best way one could spend a holiday, and the resultant crowds were indeed overwhelming in their intensity and number. That year, the films that packed out included Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the animated film Sing!. This year in New Zealand, crowds will be flocking come Boxing Day to Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and the much-ballyhooed Wicked (Sing-Along), or perhaps Robbie Williams-as-chimp biopic Better Man. There are far better choices available to you, however, including Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, the Cannes-winning Indian film which just scored surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Director at the Golden Globes, a welcome sight. New Zealanders will also be able to finally clap eyes on two of the most celebrated and buzzed-about awards-season offerings of the year. Both, incidentally, feature New York as a key element of the narrative.

Anora briefly looked like the frontrunner in this year’s Oscars race. Besting All We Imagine as Light, Seed of the Sacred Fig, Emilia Perez and – erm – Megalopolis for the Palme D’Or at Cannes, this story of an exotic dancer who falls into a shotgun marriage with the son of a Russian oligarch represented a genuine moment of ascendance for director Sean Baker, who a couple of years ago was lamenting his inability to receive access to bigger and better budgets in spite of emerging as one of America’s foremost auteurs of adventurous, mature independent films. Since then, it seems that Anora has been eclipsed somewhat by the momentum of Wicked, among others – but then a film of such emphatically adult pleasures was likely never to set the hearts of Hollywood’s more buttoned-down voters afire. The Palme is a more fitting award for Anora, a film which, in spite of not quite being the all-cylinders triumph it has been trumpeted as, is nevertheless successful in its threading the needle of artistic intention and crowd-pleasing appeal. 

Mikey Madison stars as Ani, or Anora, an exotic dancer working the (literal) grind and surviving day-to-day in New York City. The Ani we meet at the beginning of Anora is world-weary, tough-as-nails, and exceptionally savvy in the art of extracting green from the wallets of reluctant customers. Baker outlines the contours of this world deftly and swiftly. Ani is no ‘hooker with a heart of gold’: much like anyone on the bottom rungs of American capitalism, she must do what she can to survive, including clashing with other dancers when necessary and butting heads with management, as well as neglecting the insistences of her roommate to help with the running of the flat. When Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) wanders into the club with a bevvy of lads and hangers-on, reeking of money, Ani is given a chance encounter due to her ability to speak Russian. Does Ani see a genuine connection here, or a chance at a better life, or an opportunity to indulge in a self-destructive streak, or simply an invitation to test the boundaries of the world her class and upbringing have laid down for her? Baker keeps the truth of this matter largely under-wraps, in a method alternatively fascinating and exasperating, as Ani becomes harder and harder to parse out as a person even as Madison repeatedly rises to the demands of the role. 

A whirlwind escapade of hedonism and excess results in a Vegas shotgun wedding, and the sudden intrusion of Ivan’s handlers and distant parents, who immediately protest to the union and demand an annulment. Ani and Ivan’s blissful communion inside a swanky mansion is interrupted by the arrival of Toros and Garnick (Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan), two of Ivan’s parents’ head goons, and Igor (Yura Borisov), a soulful tough-guy there to make sure things don’t get out of hand. Across an indulgent, nearly two-and-a-half hour runtime, Baker presents the story of Anora in two distinct parts, plus a kind of epilogue – the romance of the opening courtship, the stress of the fallout, and emotional consequences therein. This split feels natural, and for the first ninety-or-so minutes of Anora, Baker directs with a propulsive energy that largely keeps us from catching on to some of the gaps in logic or strange undercurrents at play in the story. The courtship scenes, animated as they are by the liveliness of both Madison and Eydelshteyn’s performances, are compulsively watchable. Ani slowly reveals a soft underbelly as Ivan bounces around her like an over-excited monkey. Eydelshteyn is perfectly cast here as an immature brat with the world in his hands, a lost Succession bit-player with built-in arrested development and a worldview as narrow as Ani’s chances of a happy ending. Also great is Borisov, as the somewhat awkward hired muscle who serves as a corollary to Ani’s extensive emotional suffering in the second half of Anora. That said, the film, of course, belongs to Madison. This is the stuff stars are made of – and Madison takes hold of the reins and never letting go. Hers is a fascinating face to watch, and her energy on screen is never less-than captivating, even as the script around her begins to fall apart.

Like his previous films Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket (still his finest film), Anora is deeply interested in tales of the lower class and specifically stories about sex workers, who have featured prominently in every one of the aforementioned. What compels Baker to make this particular world the one he carries the banner for is hard to say, but Anora reveals an uncomfortable bug within his storytelling, which is the way he sometimes uses this vulnerable group of people as vessels for suffering at the expense of imbuing them with genuine life. Red Rocket is his most successful work because it invests fully in the character of Simon Rex’ one-time pornstar Mikey, a selfish, weaselly avatar for Trump’s America in his shark-like instinct for self-service. For all its bombast and energy, for all the moments of (excellent) slapstick and violence, for all the sound and the fury, Anora’s most fatal flaw is the way it renders Ani as a pawn in her own story. As she becomes embroiled in a world of money and power beyond imagining, she becomes passive, handed from situation to situation with no small amount of protest, true, but nevertheless with a minimum of actual impact on the twists and turns of the plot. Along the way, the joy of the opening half is eroded over and over, assailing Ani’s dignity on almost every front, until a denouement of such inevitability it’s hard to understand why Ani herself is so surprised by it. We are led to believe she is worldly, and understands the transactional nature of America more than most – until she is drawn into a situation of total precarity which seems to blindside her. It’s a tragic arc, but one that bumps up against credibility repeatedly. It’s disappointing, too, because Anora presents us with repeated instances where one can imagine the story taking a turn that gives Ani more agency, only to revert back to the more aggravating position of powerlessness. The point Baker seems to be making is to underline the hope-crushing, Sisyphean task of wrestling with the all-powerful grip of the hyper-rich, when you’re just one person. That’s all well-and-good, but one can’t help but wonder as we reach the film’s final scene, an uncomfortable and somewhat groan-worthy twist of the knife, to what end has this story brought us? One worth the ride?

Rating: Three-and-a-half stars

Boxing Day brings no less than six major new releases to the big screen, including these two awards-season heavy-hitters. Both are accomplished, rich dramas for adults – though they couldn’t be more different from each other – with each representing a distinct maturation in style and appeal from their respective directors.

To my genuine surprise, the best film to release this coming Boxing Day is the latest from Jesse Eisenberg, his sophomore film A Real Pain. Eisenberg is an excellent actor, but his debut film, When You Finish Saving the World (which I haven’t seen) seemed to bear all the hallmarks of a ‘Sundance’ movie – an actor indulging in the desire to direct a gentle, lightly humorous family-based dramedy with middling reviews. On first glance, one might expect A Real Pain to be much the same. It has a ‘Sundance movie’ setup that could have been prompted by ChatGPT. Eisenberg plays David, who joins his semi-estranged cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) on a tour of the sites of the Holocaust, in honour of their recently-passed Grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. The beginning of the film teases something far more middlebrow than what A Real Pain ultimately morphs into (one of the most cuttingly sad films of the year), as David and Benji have an awkward reunion at the airport highlighted by their extreme differences. David is buttoned-up, awkward, a wallflower who doesn’t endear himself easily to others. Benji is the life of the party, an exposed nerve as able to charm as to aggravate, often in the same moment. Benji, we will come to know, is also intensely vulnerable, a drifter of sorts, unable to find a foothold on a world far colder and more brutal than he has the ability to cope with. 

Eisenberg links our two protagonists with a tour group, and Eisenberg’s skill with direction of performance really sings here. Each member of the group, from the bookish know-it-all guide (Will Sharpe) to the lonely divorcee (Jennifer Grey!) to a Rwandan genocide survivor who converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan) is given room to breathe and become real, an added pleasure that a lesser filmmaker would have bypassed entirely, but which enrich our understandings of our two cousins deeply. Benji instantly both endears himself and ruthlessly alienates each member of the group, with no single member missing the gaping darkness that threatens to overtake Benji’s antics. David, there to bear witness to the holocaust, is as required to bear witness to the all-encompassing fragility of Benji, too, who is unpredictable in both the best and worst way. Eisenberg sets himself apart from other actors-turned-directors in subtle ways – the performances are, as expected, the key to the film, and Eisenberg ushers astonishing work from all involved, but his direction – patient, exacting, unfussy but evocative – makes the most of the landscape around the two cousins, drawing telling juxtapositions from their emotional landscapes and the landscape of generational horror that informs their lives. 

Both Eisenberg and Culkin are exceptional in A Real Pain. Culkin, a likely Oscar-winner this year, transitions from TV-stardom to movie-stardom with ease. His performance oscillates through almost every conceivable emotion, and we are right there with him throughout. His is one of the most lacerating, heartrending performances of the year. Eisenberg has the less glamorous duty as the rock against which Culkin crashes against. Oddly, I was reminded of David O. Russell’s The Fighter in the way their relationship is laid out – the straight man (Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter, Eisenberg here) and the live wire (Christian Bale and Culkin, respectively) – whose bouncing off each other brings the best out of both performers. The cousins are bonded by a simultaneous loathing and affectionate jealousy for the way the other lives. David’s life is routine, stable, happy – wife, kid, good-ish job, while Benji lights up every room he is in, a human embodiment of carpe diem, which makes him susceptible to higher highs and lower lows. In a lesser movie, this conflict would become heightened, leading to the two learning something about themselves and changing their ways subtly, in order to become closer and more like the other in positive ways. But this is not what A Real Pain is trying to do. Eisenberg brings us right up to the line of this – and indeed a deeper understanding is achieved – but neither cousin is ultimately able to be the other, nor to ‘save’ the other, whatever that may look like. Fittingly for the setting, death haunts A Real Pain, of forms historical, recent, and depressingly near. By the time we reach the film’s shiveringly graceful final moments, all I could think was that the film felt as much like a farewell as a story of reconnection.

Rating: Four-and-a-half stars

Anora & A Real Pain in cinemas soon (26 December 2024)

CLICK HERE TO WATCH ANORA TRAILER

CLICK HERE TO WATCH A REAL PAIN TRAILER