On the Boardwalk
In 2015, Sean Baker made one of the only widely-distributed films shot entirely on iPhones: Tangerine was his breakthrough, and at 88 minutes, a refreshing dose of something slightly new next to the anemic independent cinema of the time. Dope came out around the same time, a fine movie, but made conventionally and with none of the verve of Baker’s raucous comedy. Steven Soderbergh was another American filmmaker who tried out iPhones, with Unsane in 2018, but like Baker, he wouldn’t stick with it—it was a gimmick for them, for different reasons: Soderbergh, as always, was just trying things out, while Baker leapt up a few levels as an established American director. 2017’s The Florida Project was his most accessible movie yet, and in the thin years of the 2020s, it would sweep the Oscars.
Diverted like so many by the pandemic, Baker’s delayed 2021 follow-up Red Rocket was written quickly and made on a smaller scale; it was a good movie, carried by star Simon Rex. But at 128 minutes, with so many shots that went on for too long, so much Rex walking around—if you cut out all the wide shots of him walking, you’d have a 90-minute movie. What’s wrong with that? These aren’t epic stories or even complicated ones; there aren’t enough characters on the level of Rex in Red Rocket or Mikey Madison in Anora, which is 139 minutes and with an even thinner plot than Red Rocket.
No problem per se, but again, there’s a great 100-minute movie in here, and unlike Red Rocket, there aren’t long stretches begging to be cut, or even any scenes or sequences that bog the movie down. Instead, what it needs is a trimming in every scene, especially the confrontation at the mansion when Madison as the titular Anora and her Russian scion husband Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) try and fail to fight off the henchmen and foot soldiers of the oligarch’s family.
Baker’s his own editor here, as he was on Red Rocket, and it’s clear he needs someone else to tighten his work up. Anora may have won the Palme d’Or, and Jury President Greta Gerwig compared it to the screwball comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, but the basic fact that this is a 139 minute comedy is hard to get around. There are very few comedies that go past two hours, or even reach two hours, and most of them were made by Billy Wilder—and not all of those work either!
One of the most bafflingly choices in Anora is the isolated three-shot sequence where the camera dollies into a club as t.A.t.U’s “All the Things She Said” revs up and blares through the speakers. Besides being a memorable early-2000s pop hit, “All the Things She Said” is the theme song of Red Scare, and Baker obviously knows this, and must know how charged the song is—why throw it away on such a nothing shot? This is a song you put over the opening or end credits, or to use for extreme comic counterpoint, or the soundtrack for one of the film’s many action sequences. This is a brief, standalone shot sequence that comes and goes without saying anything.
Baker makes good movies, but I’m not sure he’s capable of making anything great. Is the ending as condescending as an after-school special? I don’t think so, but Baker has NEVER known how to end his movies, NONE of his endings work. This is the most “successful” of them so far, but it’s a low bar, and again indicative of his lack of anything to say. The roman candle that was Tangerine promised a much more adventurous filmmaker, but he parlayed that film’s success into a conventional career making relatively safe, empty movies. I can’t blame him.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith