Jan Komasa’s Anniversary is an ungainly thing, a handsomely mounted prestige drama that appears at first to be a kind of “how we live now” state of the union. But it gradually mutates into something much bigger and broader (and ultimately vaguer): a liberal-minded warning about encroaching fascism that, like its characters, plays it safe and centrist until it’s too late. It’s an inherently political story that refuses to actually think politically, instead relying on tropes and clichés to make a simple point — democracy is good, and under threat. It’s an odd dramaturgy, skipping through time to chart a hyper-linear progression of oppression, yet also so limited in scope as to occur almost entirely in one location. One can see an expanded version of this material turning into a season of streaming television, or, conversely, a stage-bound version that would require little modification from what we see here. The nagging question of “why is this a movie,” then, flits around, hanging in the air, a question Komasa and screenwriter Lori Rosene-Gambino never satisfactorily answer.
The film begins with a series of introductions; we meet Ellen and Paul Taylor (Diane Lane & Kyle Chandler), a middle-aged couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary with their children in a well-to-do Virginia suburb. Ellen is a Georgetown professor, and Paul runs a high-end restaurant for Washington D.C. movers and shakers. They’re smart, wealthy, and very smug, the kind of amiable liberals who don’t like to use terms like “left” or “right” and just want everyone to get along. Youngest daughter Birdie (McKenna Grace) is the only one who still lives at home, a high schooler with a shy demeanor but a burgeoning idealism. Middle daughter Anne (Madeline Brewer) is an edgy standup comedian on the rise, her counterculture bona fides announced when she gifts little sister Birdie with a Putney Swope poster for her bedroom wall (free tip for other filmmakers: don’t make audiences immediately think about a better, more radical political work). Eldest daughter Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) is a high-strung lawyer, who has brought social-climbing husband Rob (Daryl McCormack) along for the weekend. Last but not least is brother Josh (Dylan O’Brien), a struggling writer with low self-esteem who seems cowed by his parents’ successes, and his new girlfriend, Liz Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor), an extremely prim and proper type who speaks with a sort of robotic cadence. She’s very nervous to meet Josh’s parents, and we soon learn why: some years prior, Liz was a student of Ellen’s, and left college when Ellen reacted negatively to a provocative thesis that Liz wrote about the strengths of a one-party system. The paper contained dangerous, anti-democratic ideas, according to Ellen, who simply cannot believe that her talented little boy would date such an obviously bad apple like Liz. The anniversary dinner is subsequently tense, but remains mostly civil, and everyone eventually parts ways on speaking terms. As a gift, Liz leaves Ellen a copy of her new book, an extension of her thesis now titled The Change.
Anniversary then leaps ahead two years; Liz and Josh are married, and she is eight months pregnant with twins. Josh has cleaned up, and become more aggressive in the interim. More importantly, The Change has become a bestseller, launching Liz and Josh into the stratosphere as political savants and pop culture figures. Ellen pushes back at their new success, suggesting that the book’s sales are actually an astroturf campaign spearheaded by a huge, seemingly malevolent corporation called The Cumberland Company. But Josh is fully committed to his wife and their cause, and seems perfectly content to push his family away if they don’t fall in line. Then another year passes, and now The Change has become a fully entrenched political reality; homes in the neighborhood plant new flags in their front yards, while Anne is attacked on stage during a performance for insulting followers of this new doctrine. Birdie, meanwhile, begins dating a subversion-minded young man, who introduces her to the organized resistance against The Change, while Cynthia and Rob struggle to agree on whether or not to have children, driving a further wedge into their already precarious relationship.
The decision to document the dismantling of America through the perspective of a single family makes sense on a practical level, keeping the scope small and self-contained, a sort of American variation on The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. But Komasa and Rosene-Gambino struggle to fill in narrative gaps, eschewing subtlety for dramatic expediency. There are good satirical points to be made about the death of democracy being wrought by a weak-willed mama’s boy who was just desperate to get laid and an ambitious college student who internalized criticism from their peers and turned grievances into their entire personality; or in how a safely ensconced, lily-white family can’t see the danger until it’s too late. But there’s no comedy here, pitch black or otherwise. Anniversary takes itself deadly seriously, but as the dystopia grows and things get worse and worse, the film loses its dramatic heft and begins relying more heavily on shopworn ideas and shortcuts. Some critics are already conflating the film’s accidental timeliness with profundity, but Anniversary isn’t prescient — it’s simply telling us things we already know. What’s achieved here is a rudimentary view of totalitarianism that’s seemingly based on skimming some Orwell and watching some episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. It wants credit for diagnosing how bad things are, and for suggesting how much worse they can get. But there’s a totally realistic version of this story that doesn’t descend into vague sci-fi allusions but instead draws directly from America’s own efforts at regime change and nation-building in Guatemala, Venezuela, Iraq, etc. In other words, this history is all around us, today, not some hypothetical scenario to be warned about. By the time tragedy ultimately befalls the family, one can’t help but wonder if audiences would care at all about armed storm troopers disappearing people if they weren’t white.
DIRECTOR: Jan Komasa; CAST: Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler, Zoey Deutch, Dylan O’Brien; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: October 29; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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