thinkMovies

Masterful storytelling by an auteur of a filmmaker. It helps remembering when one were these kids' age, close to 50 years ago, and can tell the difference between this crowd and your crowd back in the day. The difference being not in the hopelessness of loneliness in the fringe of the working classes, but how much harder it is today then it was then -mainly because our present day has added an unhealthy dose of inhumanity to the mix. Kids who don't even know how to try, even if they have the guts to.

Inhumanity and incompetence have fun in the first act. Then someone must pay for all the fun, but the stupidity of the characters trying to fix things up adds line items to the check. And then... in the last second or two of the film, humanity shows up.

By the third act I was feeling it in my bones that something truly good and timeless was lurking underneath it all, rising to the surface. I was wishing the director and the editor, contrary to nowadays norms, would allow it to break the surface before the end credits. And boy was I, the audience, rewarded.

These kids, and these people, these days, may be totally fubar especially in the eyes of old timers like me, but there is one thing that never changes through the ages: the essence of human beings. For all their faults and shortcomings, people also have, deep down somewhere, the capacity for dignity. The capacity to know who they can allow themselves to be held by. Anora, whose name means "honor" or "light" was the one person, along one other character, in the whole story, who did not lie; who had the promise of strength that might provide respite from the vulnerability.

I thoroughly enjoyed Anora and I think it's sad that so many other reviewers here did not seem to get it. Perhaps being an old timer helps.

If you take a person that is a brut and an artist who fails to find minimalism, do you have a Brutalist? Better still, if you take a man from Arizona and you show him some European art, what are the chances you'll get depth and what are the chances you'll get a hall of mirrors with the pretense of depth instead?

This is another attempt at American greatness that succeeds only with those who think that "big" is another word for greatness. Yes, American filmmakers have produced art, to be proud of. But not this. This is a pretense at art that bamboozles itself into tripping over its own shoelaces.

Some formulaic soap opera devices are well-hidden but they're there. Character development is at cartoon level. Motivation of characters is a secret, apparently. Plot-milestone events were picked out of a hat, and, even though at minute 181 the writers ran out of hats, the film kept going for another 15 minutes till it stumbled on a freeze frame. Then came the end titles designed to prove that we are witnessing ...art. It was right that Best Motion Picture and Best Directing remained at nomination level: Anora was a much more honest American Tale.

Adrian Brody deserved the Oscar he got. The lines he was given in the last half hour were not his fault. The Direction and Cinematography made an effort to present the story through the mind of an artist but see first paragraph of this review, re: pretense of depth.

The gaping hole in the story line belongs between minute 189 and 190, where someone took scissors to important answers the audience deserves, but never got. Art, you see. Modernism. Whatever. This, in my opinion, is not a story about the American Dream, like some have professed. It doesn't really know what it's about.