Of all the recent films that have attempted to say something about the divisions in America sparked by the Covid crisis, Ari Aster’s Eddington has been the most savvy because five years was the perfect amount of time to develop an analysis while the wounds were still fresh. Anniversary, the English-language breakthrough of Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa, was inspired by proto-fascist concerns within the first Trump administration, but doesn’t directly allude to anything within the recent past. Even if it was intended as a response to doomerism that followed Trump’s media crackdown, the themes of Anniversary are so broad that it could be seen as a companion piece to the work of George Orwell.
Anniversary is set within a recognizable version of the present where collective disillusionment with a static America has challenged, but not disrupted the lives of a wealthy liberal family. Ellen Taylor (Diane Lane) is an idealistic Georgetown professor, who’s lectured about the necessity of freedom from her ivory tower; her husband, Paul (Kyle Chandler), is a successful restaurateur, and their children include the environmental lawyer Cynthia (Zoey Deutch), the nasty stand-up comedian Anna (Madeline Brewer), the fruitless author Josh (Dylan O’Brien), and the teenager Birdie (Mckenna Grace). The entire family’s gathered for their parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, but Ellen’s faced with a surprise when she’s introduced to Josh’s date, Liz Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor), who used to be one of her students. Ellen was responsible for Liz’s expulsion from Georgetown after she submitted a controversial term essay that advocated for a one-party solution.
The premise of Anniversary might read as a political thriller, but it's more effective as an epic. Similar to classics like John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley or Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Komasa’s success is in the exploration of significant societal changes through the narrow perspective of one family. The narrative hook is that Ellen’s dismissiveness may-or-may-not be responsible for the rise of a radicalized centrist movement; upon her dismissal from Georgetown, Liz wrote the persuasive novel The Change: The New Social Contract, which galvanized a significant portion of America’s unengaged voters to rally behind her perspective. This is the rare point in the film in which Komasa’s perspective as a non-American filmmaker is apparent; his assumption that a significant percentage of Americans would read a non-fiction book (or even know how to) is borderline fantastical.
Anniversary is heavy-handed, but it’s smart to not cut to footage of capital riots, montages of political decrees, or animations of redrawn federal maps. It’s focus is on a single family that’s pulled apart when their personal ethics, politics, and values all clash. Despite how blunt each of the characters speak, Anniversary doesn’t do much finger-wagging; it’s up for debate whether Ellen was right to be concerned about a student with autocratic sentiments, and if she was justified to silence her. Ellen’s a prickly character, but Anniversary doesn’t solely define her as being a stubborn, middle-aged white liberal; in fact, her husband Paul might be just as intellectually compromised because his desire for peace comes at the price of meaningful discourse.
The most interesting character in Anniversary is Liz, because her individualism is insurance that the film’s moral dilemma isn’t entirely theoretical. A common talking point among contemporary academics is that far-right propaganda networks have lured young men to grow agitated by “replacement theory,” which has sown the seeds for extremist hate speech and conspiracy theories. Liz isn’t just a rejection of this cliche because she’s a woman, but because she came to her belief system independently; as an impoverished child who didn’t have the family support system that the Taylors did, Liz came to her lionization of a dominant-party system independently. She’s also not framed as being particularly angry, given that the film’s melodrama is centered on Liz’s failed attempts to break bread with Ellen. Anniversary doesn’t suggest that a pretentious educator is enough to spark a nationwide insurgency, but it does hint that Liz might’ve seen the faults within her argument had her paper been accepted in good faith. That Liz is a soft-spoken, blisteringly naive spokeswoman for a movement that’s transformed into something else entirely is why she’s an effective catalyst, and only an antagonist from a certain point of view.
The faults that emerge in Anniversary are related to the escalation of public sentiment and governmental reaction, which make the familial dynamics more reactionary. While there’s an implication that the Taylors are too out-of-touch to understand that this unkempt animosity has lurked within the general population long before Liz’s essay, the rate at which the country is transformed into a Hunger Games-style totalitarian state with armed militias is absurd; even the subtle attempts to invoke “Trump speak” are a reminder that realism can’t be equated with compelling drama.
O’Brien is a standout because Josh is caught between his wife’s prominence within “The Cause” and the loyalty he’s felt towards his family; eventually, Josh’s anger over his parents’ inability to accept Liz is enough for him to hold even more steadfast in his beliefs, to the point that he’s more radical than his wife ever was. It’s the boldest idea in the film; even if someone underprivileged, like Liz, had sincere intentions to challenge the status quo, and notions of construction a New World Order would be hijacked by those who already had power.
The other performances are less successful; the decision to make Anna a “brutally honest” lesbian stand-up comic who can see the truth is either an unusual attempt at roundabout satire or a story beat left over from 2016. Similarly, the dynamic between Cynthia and her husband Rob (Daryl McCormack) is undeveloped because they’re too passive for their marital strife to be significant. Anniversary isn’t a classic, but it’s an appropriate time capsule that could end up being prescient.