Anniversary is the type of film that’s popped up since the start of the Trump era: an attempt to make a narrative film that reflects the current times, with a touch of satire and a loose approximation of America today.
Directed by Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa, from a script by writer Lori Rosene-Gambino, Anniversary has a first-rate cast and offers a better set-up than most films of this type. But it makes a lot of the same mistakes as many of the other movies in this subgenre. Ari Aster’s Eddington has cracked the code, but few others have.
Anniversary’s hook is compelling: Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler play a DC-area power couple, in which she’s a celebrated Georgetown professor and he’s a restaurateur. They have four children: A failed sci-fi writer (Dylan O’Brien), an environmental lawyer (Zoey Deutch), a lesbian stand-up comedian (Madeline Brewer), and a promising teenage daughter (McKenna Grace).
The inciting incident is that at the anniversary party, O’Brien’s character brings home a new girlfriend named Elizabeth (Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor). Lane’s professor remembers her as a former student who once authored a thesis that advocated for one-party rule of the country, in the name of unity. Things get awkward, before they later get worse than awkward. Over the course of nearly two hours, including several time jumps, Elizabeth’s thesis becomes the basis for a bestselling book and subsequent rising fascist movement called “The Change,” the family’s torn apart, and the subsequent dinner-table arguments are fierce.
The performances are all very good, especially O’Brien as a character who slowly evolves from sad-sack failure to loathsome Stephen Miller type. Dynevor plays the part not as a stand-in for Ann Coulter or Katie Miller, but rather as sweet and soft-spoken, beneath the fascist ideology. It’s great to see Diane Lane at the center of a movie again, while Kyle Chandler, like his Friday Night Lights coach, once again plays a character with the surname “Taylor.”
The big problem with Anniversary is that it doesn’t have much to say about today’s political moment. First, like so many attempts at this from Trump’s first term, like The Hunt, The Oath, and Irresistible, the formula that it’s landed on is “conservatives are hateful monsters, while liberals are overly smug and elitist.” This is an outdated and worn-out perspective. Also, we’re shown very little of what’s happening in the world outside of the family’s home, and not given a lot of detail about what the political program of “The Change” is. It seems Curtis Yarvin-like, but all we really learn is that one particular corporation is executing the ideas behind Elizabeth’s book. Who’s the president? What’s Congress doing? What does this movement think about race, immigration, religion, or foreign wars?
Anniversary came out earlier this fall and arrived on VOD last week. In early-November, a producer of the film complained to The Wrap that Lionsgate “buried” the film, because it “may have felt too close to our political reality.”
I’m don’t buy this, especially since the public’s distaste for such films isn’t new, nor is it specific to the first year of the second Trump era. The films mentioned above all flopped as well, and not a lot of people saw Eddington. But something incendiary like One Battle After Another, if it’s good enough, can make an impact.