Inventing Anna

Inventing Anna | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

We wanted to watch this when we heard that Julia Garner, who played Ruth on Ozark, was in it. Ruth is like a female Samuel L. Jackson, she is the smart, foul mouthed, white trash girl who becomes Marty Byrd's second in command, running the whole show while Marty is occupied with the high-level crazy shit, which is almost all the time. 

Her character here is not nearly so compelling. Anna Chlumsky as the journalist Vivian Kent is the focus here and she is keeping us engaged. The story is about how Anna Delvey conned a bunch of rich folks into financing her scheme to build a private club and so make her the fortune she pretended to have all along. The part that is compelling is how several women were conned into believing that she was their friend and how far down the rathole they were willing to be dragged before they finally realized that the whole thing was a scam and they had gotten sucked in. Some bailed out sooner, some later. The question now is (only one episode left), will Neff (the black concierge from a high end hotel) hang on till the bitter end?

P.S. The show paints a picture of a scam artist, but the story is about the reporter trying to figure out what happened. She has a ton of data from social media, but it is almost entirely worthless. Most of the pictures she found where Anna is posed next to some celebrity / socialite are just people she met in passing. Most of them have no idea who she is, and the few who did know her don't want to talk because they got scammed and that could be embarrassing or even damaging to their business.

Anna was obsessed with clothes, and most of the people she glommed onto wore fancy clothes, but I think that was because they were rich, and when you are rich, that's what you do. If you've got ten million in the bank spending then 50 grand on your wardrobe is like buying a candy bar for a working man, nothing to fret over. There is another character in the story, Van, who works in the fancy clothes business. He is also obsessed with clothes, but that's how he makes his living, and he works at it. A telling line is when he finds out that Anna has been arrested, his only question is what color are the clothes the jail issued to her.

All of which goes to show that all this social media noise is entirely superficial.  Some people have built successful careers on this noise, but those people are in a precarious position. If the winds change you could find yourself in a world of hurt. If you are going to build your castle on a foundation of sand, don't be surprised if it suddenly collapses.