If you despair over the current state of American movies, it’s important to remember that 1) there’s always been garbage, 2) garbage sells. It’s easy to point at lame sequels and tired franchises, but the zone of the Oscar movie, the “prestige picture,” has just as much garbage as any other genre. In any given year, there are a handful of great movies that’ll endure, and that’s true for most of film history. For every Terms of Endearment, or even middling awards movies like Country and Coal Miner’s Daughter, there are 50 kinds of Anna.
Released in October 1987, Anna stars Sally Kirkland in the title role, a Czech actress who made it big on Broadway. Paulina Porizkova plays Krystyna, one of Anna’s fans and an aspiring actress who moves to New York and, against all odds, befriends Anna and experiences some success of her own. It’s a riff on All About Eve, with just about every cliché you can think of: frosty meeting by the stage door, the “very hot right now” director who eyes Krystyna and sees a future star, Anna’s mid-life crisis and Krystyna’s precipitous rise, and the personal betrayal that tears them apart. It’s very All About Eve, but with a lousy script, a terrible score, and a cast that barely registers.
I can’t stress enough how bad Greg Hawkes’ score is in this movie. The sound of Anna is everything that was wrong with music in the 1980s: chintzy synths playing pieces meant for orchestras. It sounds so small and cheap that it immediately ruins the movie because you know it can only be so good with music this bad. The 1972 Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton collaboration Hammersmith is Out has a very bad score that’s used much too much, but it’s such a strange movie that I keep coming back to it—the music isn’t stopping me, but it’s still annoying. Watching something as anodyne and lifeless as Anna borders on impossible when every piece of music sounds like something from a Nintendo game.
As for Kirkland, this was her first major leading role after years of supporting and bit parts in films like The Sting, The Way We Were, Blazing Saddles, Candy Stripe Nurses, The Young Nurses, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin. She puts on a Czech accent and it’s just awful, she would’ve been better off with just “a trace” of Czech in her voice. She’s sort of like Meryl Streep doing an Italian accent in The Bridges of Madison County, ruining what could’ve been a great movie—but Anna was never going to amount to much. Once a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene and an accomplished avant garde theater actress, Kirkland’s leading lady moment came relatively late in life (46). I can’t be the only one who always got her mixed up with the late Sally Kellerman, (Kirkland died last November at 84); Kirkland didn’t keep the hits coming, and of all the films she made after 1987, only JFK and Bruce Almighty, a bizarre combo, stick out.
Kirkland was nominated for Best Actress in 1988 for her work in Anna. Despite VHS tapes in the early-1990s and a DVD release in 2004, Anna remains relatively obscure for a film so acclaimed in its time. Fewer than 700 Letterboxd members have logged Anna, yet Sheila Benson called it “a consummate study of love, alienation, and loss.” Even if this was before these clichés were widely recognized and mocked, Anna is still pablum, especially coming so soon after so much amazing European cinema in the 1970s and early-1980s. Holland, like Mira Nair and Guillermo Del Toro, make safe, “palatable” foreign language films that American critics can digest (remember, to them, Kieslowski is a god). Director Yurek Bogayevicz had a brief career working in Hollywood, but by the early-2000s he was directing commercials in Poland. They’re probably better than Anna.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith