We might be looking at 2024’s Best Picture winner
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: An exotic dancer marries the son of one of Russia’s richest men, creating chaos within the family, which is determined to annul the marriage.
About: Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or winning film, Anora, is already his biggest box office hit, taking in 7.5 million dollars so far. To people who only track the box office of movies with 200 million dollar advertising campaigns, that may not seem like much. But Baker’s movies have no money for advertising and are dependent on their quality alone (unlike the Marvel universe) and therefore, 7.5 million dollars WITH MOMENTUM to make a lot more is amazing.
Writer: Sean Baker
Details: 2 hours and 20 minutes
Sean Baker may be my favorite director at the moment.
With his only competition being the Safdies and the Daniels, Baker is number one in the books at bringing ENERGY to indie movies.
Every other indie movie is slow and lethargic. You watch a Sean Baker movie and you feel like you’ve just watched an Avengers movie. They have the same kind of energy. Dare I say, Baker’s Anora has MORE energy than any of the last five Marvel films.
That may be more of a commentary on Marvel than Baker but regardless this guy is a master at making every moment in his movie watchable. I can’t overstate that. This movie was 2 hours and 20 minutes long and there was never a moment in the film where my concentration strayed.
That NEVER happens to me these days. I’m always straying. Because writers (and directors) don’t know how to keep my interest. The better ones can create great scenes every once in a while and keep me engaged in the meantime. But to make EVERY moment compelling?? I don’t experience that anymore except for Baker and maybe the Safdies.
Oh, and by the way!? Baker may be the best casting director in the world. Let me give you a concrete example. The Pitt-Clooney movie Wolfs on Apple contained a very similar character to the character of Ivan in this movie (he’s known as “Kid” in Wolfs and he’s supposed to be this young wild character). The actor who played Kid in that film was below-average to weak. Even annoying at times. He wasn’t exciting nor was he really watchable in any way, which hurt the film because he had a giant part.
But the actor who played Ivan in Anora? I don’t think I’ve seen a young actor this charismatic in two decades. And Baker found him. And don’t even get me started on the actress who played Anora, Mikey Madison. She’s amazing. The guy seems to have an incredible instinct for this stuff.
I wanted to get the directing praise out of the way first because I want to use the rest of the review to talk about the unique screenplay here.
Note: This script’s narrative moves in an unpredictable way so the very nature of reading this synopsis is a spoiler. I suggest you see the movie first, if possible.
Anora is a 23 year old exotic dancer who works in a Jersey strip club. One day, a 21 year old boisterous Russian kid comes in to get a lap dance, chooses Anora, and afterwards, he gets her number. The next day he pays her to come over to his sick crib and have sex.
At first, Anora is all about the money. But it’s clear she’s starting to like Ivan. Ivan proposes hiring Anora for the week and she accepts. They have sex, party, play video games. Then they go on an impromptu Vegas trip and, while there, mostly because he’s wasted and lives in the moment, Ivan proposes to Anora. She says yes and they get married that night!
They go back to Jersey and that’s when Ivan’s handler, Toros, shows up with two thugs, Garnick and Igor. We learn that Ivan’s Russian parents are extremely rich and that there is no f*cking way they’re letting their son marry an American stripper. But the parents are back in Russia. So Toros must get this marriage annulled immediately or he’s in a heap of trouble.
There’s only one problem: Ivan runs away!
He just leaves the house! He even leaves his wife there! Toros has no choice but to call the parents and tell them what happened. Furious, they immediately get on a plane to Jersey. Anora, who’s blindly convinced that things are still going to work out, is now forced to team up with Toros and the thugs to go find her husband before the damn parents arrive.
(Ending spoilers follow) It’s an all-night excursion as Ivan gets plastered and jumps from nightclub to nightclub, party to party, with our pursuers always a step behind. When they finally catch up to Ivan, Anora is expecting him to make things right. But a sobered-up Ivan shrugs his shoulders in defeat and says, sure, let’s get it annulled.
Betrayed, Anora spirals into a mental tailspin. The only person by her side is Igor, the kind-hearted, but dim-witted, thug who, in his own quiet way, has been there through it all. After the annulment is finalized, Igor is the one tasked with bringing her back to her sad Jersey life. But in those final moments together, as she reflects on everything that’s happened, Anora begins to wonder if she’s missed something—or someone—who’s been right in front of her all along.
There are so SO many good things about this script I don’t know where to start. Baker is a low-key great writer.
Let’s start somewhere random – the villain. Because we haven’t talked about villains in a while and this is a great example of how to write a villain with logic. Most writers start off knowing their villains are bad and then spend the rest of the script figuring out WHY they’re bad. Whereas, with Toros, Baker started with WHY Toros was “bad” and then let the villainy aspects of the character emerge from there.
This is how you create characters with truth. You don’t force aspects onto them. You figure out their motivation and let them act in accordance with that motivation. Toros is the villain to Anora and Ivan here. They like each other. They’re married. He wants to destroy that. But Toros has a very good reason for wanting to destroy that. He’s been hired specifically by Ivan’s parents to watch him and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid while in America. So if Ivan does anything remotely stupid, it is Toros who is going to be in trouble. And not regular trouble. Angry Russian oligarch trouble, which is the kind of trouble that could end with you six feet under. So OF COURSE Toros is doing this stuff.
There’s this blink-and-you-miss-it moment late in the screenplay when they go to the Jersey courthouse to get the marriage annulled and learn that they can’t get it annulled here. It must be in Vegas. Toros is stumbling back to the car outside saying, to no one in particular, “I didn’t know this! Everyone can see that right? I was not told that they got married in Vegas. This is not my fault!”
You can see the fear in Toros’s eyes in that moment and understand why he is so adamant about achieving his goal.
Which brings me to another aspect of the screenplay that I loved, which is that every character here has a story. There is no character who is overlooked. For example, any other writer writing these two thugs would’ve seen them as afterthoughts. Baker gives Igor this under-the-radar crush storyline on Anora. And Garnick has this hilarious storyline where he deals with the deteriorating effects of a head injury dished out by Anora early on.
But the coolest thing about this screenplay is that it reboots twice. Rebooting is the act of telling one story but then, at some point, abandoning that story and telling another one. It’s a high-risk high-reward tool and should not be used by the faint-hearted. Because it rarely works.
Usually, people come to a movie to see THAT MOVIE. So, when you, all of a sudden, tell them they’re now going to watch another movie, they feel hoodwinked.
Let me try and explain this. You’ve all seen Pretty Woman, right? Pretty Woman is about a businessman who hires a prostitute to be his girlfriend for the week he’s in town. When we went to see that movie, THAT’S THE MOVIE WE SAW. We didn’t see a movie about a businessman who hired a prostitute to be his girlfriend for the week and then, midway through the movie, he flew back to his hometown and dealt with family issues there. However, if he had, that would’ve been a script reboot.
In Anora, the script starts out as a Pretty Woman update. Ivan hires Anora to be his girlfriend for the week. But he takes it a step further and marries her. The bad guys come in and say you need to get an annulment. We’re thinking this is a 2024 version of Romeo and Juliet. That the movie is going to be about them resisting their evil older overlords and that love will conquer all.
But the script reboots when Ivan runs away. That doesn’t fit any of the criteria of the story we have been promised. They must now go find Ivan. And that becomes the entire middle of the movie. It is a reboot because it is a completely different movie. It’s basically a chase movie now. It certainly isn’t a movie about Ivan and Anora falling in love because Ivan’s barely in the story anymore.
That’s a giant risky move as a screenwriter and it worked.
But what shocked me is that Baker had the balls to reboot the script AGAIN. Technically, once they get the annulment, the movie should be over! Think about it. We’ve achieved the goal. What else is there to do?
Well, Baker has been stealthily setting up this low-key romance (mainly one-way romance) between Igor and Anora. So he creates this final storyline where Igor takes Anora back home. It’s a good 25 minute story that is completely different from everything that’s come before it. Which is why it’s a reboot.
Typically, when you end a storyline (in this case, getting the marriage annulled), all the air goes out of the balloon. So if you try and start a new storyline, you’re asking the reader to stick with you while you blow all that air into a new balloon. And most readers just don’t have the patience for that. Yet here, it works because Baker did such a good job setting it up that we want to see how this relationship is going to be resolved.
There’s a lot more to this movie than what I’ve covered but this should give you an idea of why I love this movie so much and why I think it will probably win Best Picture.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t be afraid to incorporate big-budget screenplay tactics into small-budget indie-type scripts. I loved that Baker created this 15 hour ticking time bomb in the second act. They needed to find Ivan and get the marriage annulled by the time his parents’ plane landed. That urgency helped move that second act along like a bullet train.
