A few days ago Variety‘s Clayton Davis posted a likely Best Actress list, and believe it or not he had Anora‘s Mikey Madison in tenth place.
Davis actually ranked her behind Emilia Perez‘s Karla Sofía Gascón, whose performance is definitely supporting and who will absolutely lose if she runs in the Best Actress category. (Was I right about Lily Gladstone?) And behind Challengers‘ Zendaya, The Substance star Demi Moore and Maria‘s Angelina Jolie. And behind Lady Gaga‘s unseen performance in Joker: Folie à Deux.
The hard-working but out-to-lunch Davis doesn’t seem to understand how good Madison’s performance is. But I do, and so will everyone else when Anora opens in mid-October.
HE Cannes review:
Sean Baker’s Anora (Neon, 10.18) is a loud, coarse and emotionally forceful film, mostly set in southern Brooklyn (an area close to Coney Island and Little Odessa) with two side journeys to Las Vegas. It’s entirely about straight white Russian trash, and yet a certain amount of soul, grace and dignity are allowed to emerge at the very end.
It’s basically a social-conflict, family-values story (written as well as directed by Baker) about money, sex, arrogance, rage, outsider sturm und drang and a truly bountiful blend of incredible bullshit, screaming hostility and straight talk.
The first act is exasperating (mostly vulgar behavior by profligate 20something party animals) but once a certain family gets involved…look out.
The Anora battle is between the cynical, sex-working, Russian-descended titular character (Mikey Madison, who played the hysterical, screechy-voiced Susan Atkins in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) who prefers the colloquial “Ani” vs. a demimonde of vulgar, grotesquely wealthy Russians, principally Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, the wasteful-idiot son of a Russian oligarch, and one or two none-too-bright Armenians.
And yet it ends on a note of honest emotional admission and revelation even. There’s actually a decent dude in this film, played by Yuriy Borisov…a Russian fellow who isn’t a ferociously propulsive wolverine…imagine.
Madison is a revelation — she deserves to win the Best Actress prize. Out of the blue, her career has been high-octaned and then some.
On top of which Anora isn’t the least bit wokey — no militant trans or gay stuff, no #MeToo currents, no POC or progressive castings, no 2024 Academy mandate inclusions for their own sake and in fact blissfully free of that whole pain-in-the-ass checklist mindset.
