The fake German heiress known as Anna “Delvey” Sorokin came to fame in 2018 after an absorbing New York Magazine story by Jessica Pressler detailing how the con artist scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars from hotels, restaurants, and banks. Donning designer frames and chokers at trial, Sorokin became a social media sensation, but it was at the cost of substantive discussions about money and identity that surrounded her case.
With Inventing Anna, a fictionalized reimagining of Pressler’s article, Shonda Rhimes seeks to rectify that, examining its broader themes of social mobility and the ways that money can blind people. The nine-part series suffers from a few meandering detours but succeeds in its goal of elevating its central figure, played by Julia Garner, from internet fashion meme to a human being who was, at turns, a naïve criminal and a business-minded wunderkind.
Rhimes sticks close to the source material, expanding on the details of the Sorokin case while introducing Pressler stand-in Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) as an unfairly disgraced journalist trying to break a story before her pregnancy comes to term. This framing lends Inventing Anna an entertaining whodunit structure as Vivian homes in on Anna’s acquaintances, lovers, or friends before coming to the realization that there’s no consistent profile of her subject. Anna’s techie ex-boyfriend, Chase (Saamer Usmani), recalls her as a manipulative money-obsessed mastermind, while her one real friend, Neff (Alexis Floyd), believes that she was a generous person who was “good for her money” until her aspirations fell through.
The emotional core of Anna’s story is her dream of leasing the iconic Church Missions House in Manhattan and creating a private arts club named the Anna Delvey Foundation. As Anna strings along big financial institutions and hosts dinners for socialites and architects, the series makes the case for the Delvey persona as her greatest accomplishment.
A 25-year-old with no work experience outside of a magazine internship, Anna was able to convince elite members of New York society to not only cater to her living needs but also invest in her business plans. Inventing Anna exposes the willful ignorance of society’s wealthy elites and their tendency toward turning a blind eye to shady narratives when presented with a potential cash grab. The series argues that it wasn’t that the Delvey persona was perfectly convincing—after all, she paid in cash and constantly defaulted on her credit cards—but that these people had things to gain from believing that Anna was a German heiress.
Inventing Anna’s navigation of its parallel storylines, though, may lead to viewer whiplash, especially when the series shifts away from the strange case of Anna’s escapades to explore the process of Vivian’s investigative reporting. Chlumsky does her best with the routine role of the disheveled, suspecting journalist, but while Vivian’s relationship with her dismissive editor, Paul (Tim Guinee), gestures at workplace issues like sexism, her subplot is comparatively flimsy, and conspicuously feels like just a framing device for Anna’s backstory.
In one of the best scenes of the series, Anna and Neff are lying in bed talking about each other’s families and lives. The straight-laced Neff laments that she’s a normal person whose bills and rent prevent her from being a filmmaker, to which Anna responds, “If it’s important enough, we do the things we want to do.” Marked by a casual tension, the scene expresses the duality between Anna and Neff, and it’s fascinating for the way that Anna’s sincerity is lost on Neff, who takes her friend’s words as the quixotic musings of a wealthy socialite.
While Inventing Anna glamorizes its subject and her white-collar crimes to a degree, Rhimes isn’t particularly sympathetic toward Anna, who Garner inhabits with an ironic girl boss-ism, at once petulant and incisive, that’s consistently keyed to the headspace of an immigrant fixated on high society and wealth. By the end of the trial, viewers are left with a near-complete mosaic of Anna’s life, from her family background as Russian immigrants in Germany to the debut of the “Anna Delvey” persona in France.
After all the interviews that Vivian conducts with art collectors, lifestyle trainers, and even her subject’s parents, it becomes clear what made Anna so magnetic to society’s high-rollers wasn’t her personality or looks, but her brazen aspirational dreams. Inventing Anna portrays its titular subject through the institutions and figures she cons to expose a society more than willing to roll over for a fake heiress who could pull off the part. The series doesn’t so much indict Anna’s crimes as it does the VIPs blindsided by her.
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