Critics — the thinking ones anyway — have been wearing out the phrase “a movie of its moment” these past couple of years.
A leader out to tear the country to pieces surfed a tidal wave of oligarch money, ignorance and hate to power. Films from “Joker” and “Civil War” to “One Battle After Another” have spoken — directly or indirectly — to America’s division and the current existential and Constitutional crisis.
But “Anniversary” is the movie that brings it all home, parking the autocrats with the democrats under the same roof. It’s a dystopian parable about the furious schisms in families wrought by political division, the normalizing of intolerance and indecency and “principles” that aren’t of much use when masked goons are knocking at your door.
Polish director Jan Komasa (“The Hater” and the Oscar-nominated “Corpus Christi” were his), first-time-feature screenwriter Lori Rosene-Gambino and a star-studded cast take us into a toxic landscape where battle lines are drawn and the only ones trying to keep the peace are ineffectual because they refuse to recognize the peril in not taking sides.
And it all happens under a single roof, a family torn to pieces over five years of “anniversaries” that devolve from pained celebrations to the muzzled, menaced lashing out against the autocracy one family cannot keep from taking over.
Ellen and Paul Taylor (Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler) are a D.C. “power couple” of the second tier. She’s an academic who declines to align herself as either a “conservative or liberal,” but lets her passion for the Constitution, the Rule of Law, freedom and human rights out every time she shows up on a TV political debate show. Paul’s a veteran restaurateur whose Capital City eatery has drawn a generation of the connected rich, the elected and the appointed.
Daughter Anna (“Orange is the New Black” breakout Madeline Brewer) has become a popular hot-button-issue comic. Younger daughter Cynthia (Zoey Deutch of “Set It Up”) is a hardnosed lawyer married to a fellow attorney (Daryl McCormack of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”) and partner with whom she tackles environmental cases.
And youngest daughter Birdie (McKenna Grace of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”) is still in school, an aspiring biologist already expert in the funguses of the Potomac River.
But as the Taylors celebrate their 25th anniversary, only son Josh (Dylan O’Brien from the “Maze Runner” movies and TV’s “Teen Wolf”) is the one who turns over the table at this posh party Dad catered and set up. He’s shown up with his petite and ever-so-proper new lady friend, Liz. And Liz (Phoebe Dynevor of TV’s “Bridgerton”) and Josh’s mom have history.
Liz was one of those entitled young academics who wanted to speak her autocracy-embracing mind in class, whose entitlement included flipping out when her self-assured fascist certitudes got slapped down by Professor Ellen, who found the glib “one party” advocacy of her student “dangerous. Ellen isn’t buying Liz’s connection to her aspiring writer-son as a coincidence.
“What do you want, Elizabeth?”
Gullible, failing novelist Josh doesn’t see a problem here. “Give her a chance and you might like her.” Her husband dismisses her alarm at Liz’s “radical idealogy.” “College students…they’re all a bunch of little Mussolinis.”
But we and Ellen see through the calculation of the young woman with a right wing corporation/think tank’s book deal.
“You know, I used to be afraid of you,” Liz coos. “But I don’t think I am any more.”
That book, “The Change,” has big money backers and media amplification, thanks to its telegenic author. She may be the classic “stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like,” a Bari Weiss, Charlie Kirk, Andrew Tate “influencer” of the easily influenced, spouting talking points the superrich tax-avoidances class are happy to underwrite.
Her book is quicjly ginned up into a “movement,” complete with bastardized Stars and Stripes flown by fools who fall for the Orwellian double-speak of The Cumberland Company and its compliant talking heads.
“Anniversary” is about the years-long consequences of this coupling, which may have begun as Liz’s ultimate revenge on a smug-smarter-than-her academic but which spirals into drone-enforced “curfews,” political persecution (Anna goes into hiding), where even the census is weaponized to intimidate those who don’t meekly fall into line.
Over the course of five years of future anniversaries, the Taylor family is torn asunder, and America falls with it.
The performances in this living current events dystopia crackle with brittle fury, with Lane snapping time and again, Grace channeling outrage into Anna’s woke lesbian stage act and O’Brien reminding us that dictatorships run on mediocrities just like him, failures empowered by finding the right whipping boy and joining those doing the whipping.
The “just a perspective outside your own” threat will be minimized and characters will be radicalized, recriminations will be whispered and doublespeak celebrated. Chandler’s nuanced turn stands out as Paul’s determination to hang on to a business with out-of-political-favor baggage and a family that won’t listen to his “no politics at the table” frustrates even a peacemaker like him.
Oh, how we’ll miss those “turkey and (Native American) genocide” Thanksgiving debates when the right wing thought police are in charge.
The narrative features assorted tugs-of-war over the mortal soul of some characters, with others of the Rally Around Mom No Matter What mindset. Who is “grooming” whom may be in doubt, but there is no arguing about which side has more sinister intent.
There are few accidents in movies, and making a Crowded House classic “our song” for the anniversary couple forces the viewer to consider what lyrics like “There is freedom within, there is freedom without” mean.
Director Komasa even plays with star Diane Lane’s punk film teen years in the music that Ellen jams to when nobody’s around. “Punk” is a word assorted right wing figures are appropriating to describe their idea of civil debate, their journalism and their ethos, something reflected in Liz’s espoused “philosophy.
And get a load of what the button-pushing comic Anna named her dog if you want to see where her finger points as to How We Got Here. “Garland.”
It’s a lot to take in, but considering how everybody’s favorite description of the past ten years is “It’s been a lot,” that’s only fitting.
“Anniversary” may be, like its “movie of the moment” forebears, another shout into the void. But everybody involved — especially Lane, whose performance is another career highlight — can take heart in trying to sum up democracy’s collapse as seen through one, generally slow-to-alarm inside-the-beltway family’s disintegration. Yeah, it happened like this.
Rating: R, violence, profanity, sex is discussed
Cast: Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler, Phoebe Dynevor, McKenna Grace, Madeline Brewer, Daryl McCormack, Dylan O’Brien and Zoey Deutch.
Credits: Directed by Jan Komasa, scripted by Lori Rosene-Gambino. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:51
