Sean Baker’s Anora is the kind of movie that practically begs to be loved. It is funny, energetic, vulgar-ish, unexpectedly tender, and anchored by a terrific performance from Mikey Madison. It also has enough self-conscious quirkiness and carefully calibrated eccentricity to make you aware of just how much it wants to be loved. Beneath the surface of its chaotic romantic comedy is a movie considerably less daring than it initially appears.
Buy AnoraMadison plays Anora, a Brooklyn stripper who meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled son of a Russian billionaire. Ivan has money, almost no supervision, and the emotional maturity of a teenager with a platinum credit card. After a whirlwind courtship, he and Anora impulsively marry in Las Vegas. Naturally, his wealthy family is not thrilled.
The premise gives Baker plenty of opportunities to indulge his fascination with people living on the fringes of respectable society. The early scenes are often hilarious, particularly as Anora and Ivan throw themselves into a fantasy made possible by his seemingly bottomless supply of money. Baker shoots their excess with infectious energy, but there is an undercurrent of cynicism that keeps the fairy tale from becoming too comfortable.
The trouble is that Anora eventually becomes less interesting as it becomes more obviously interested in being meaningful. Once Ivan disappears and his family’s employees arrive to force Anora into an annulment, the film shifts from outrageous comedy into something closer to a class-conscious character study. That transition isn’t inherently problematic, but Baker stretches it out, repeating variations on the same conflict until the movie begins to feel longer than its ideas warrant. The chaos remains entertaining, yet the emotional architecture underneath it is surprisingly conventional.
Madison is considerably better than the material requires. Anora could easily have become a collection of stripper stereotypes, but Madison gives her intelligence, pride, anger, and vulnerability. She doesn’t play Anora as someone who has been foolishly duped by a rich boy. She understands exactly what money can buy, and she understands exactly what it can’t.
The supporting cast is strong, particularly Yura Borisov as Igor, whose performance gradually transforms what initially looks like another comic goon into the film’s most emotionally interesting character. Unfortunately, the movie’s eventual interest in Igor feels somewhat manufactured. Baker seems to realize that he needs someone capable of seeing Anora as a human being rather than as a problem to be solved, and Borisov obligingly supplies the required tenderness.
There is plenty to admire here. Baker’s sympathy for his characters is genuine, Madison is excellent, and the movie contains sequences of sustained comic energy that other filmmakers might struggle to maintain. But Anora sometimes mistakes compassion for insight. Its observations about wealth, class, sex work, and loneliness are appealingly humane without being especially profound.
The film’s final moments are effective precisely because Baker finally stops trying to make us laugh and simply allows Anora to be vulnerable. Yet even here, the emotional impact feels slightly engineered, as though the movie has been steering us toward this particular revelation for two hours.
Anora is a good movie, and at times a very good one. But the gap between what it is and what it seems to think it is becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. Baker has made a lively, compassionate, beautifully performed film about people searching for affection in a world governed by money, but it would be more effective if it trusted its characters enough to say less and let the audience discover more for itself.
