1 Year: Revisiting 'Anniversary'

Last year, Dustin wrote that Anniversary, starring Kyle Chandler and Diane Lane, was pretty good, but not great.

Komasa presents an almost Handmaid’s Tale-like future, but the bigger the dystopia becomes, the less impact it has. The film wants to explore how authoritarianism crushes one family, yet the dystopia gets lost in their melodrama.

He wasn’t entirely wrong. The melodrama is almost at V.C. Andrews levels when Diane Lane looks across the table at her daughter-in-law and snarls, “If you try to groom another one of my children, I will kill you.”

I think its primary flaw is its focus on the affluent, well-educated Taylor family. Those types of fictional families are always melodramatic. There’s an entire genre basically dedicated to how melodramatic affluent, white families are.

But in the time since that review was written, it’s safe to say that the Trump administration has lived up to both the melodrama and the sickening escalation of fascism Anniversary was warning us about.

The melodrama is stuff like installing all of the tacky, gilded decor in the Oval Office, and the ridiculous claims that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was “vandalized” by unknown perpetrators who used knives to cut holes in the paint job. The fascism is him having the National Guard arrest people who visit the pool and dare to touch it.

The Sturm und Drang is not limited to the current resident of the White House, either. Greg Bovino managed to serve a particularly twerpy brand of melodramatic fascism as former Border Patrol Commander-at-Large. Last year, he oversaw the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis that resulted in the unconstitutional detainment of immigrants and the deaths of protestors Alex Pretti and Renée Good, while dressed like this:

“Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” hasn’t been so relevant since 1977.

JD Vance has been very melodramatically beefing with The Pope over how to be a good Catholic. And listen, I’m as lapsed a Catholic as they come, but even I know The Pope is right on this one. Vance is a recent convert to Catholicism, and converts are generally the most zealous. You can see that play out in Anniversary with Dylan O’Brien’s (Send Help) character, Josh.

A mediocre fiction writer when he met Elizabeth (Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor), Josh is enamored with her and feels as if he’s a part of something bigger by helping her write her book, “The Change.” Although the theory of unifying the country under one political party is Elizabeth’s idea, Josh’s fanaticism leads him to betray his family for her political ideals. His moment of clarity comes too late, and things do not end well for him.

It would be nice if we could say with certainty that things will end badly for Vance too. Josh was manipulated by his clever, cunning wife and The Cumberland Company. JD Vance is being manipulated by tech billionaires and a less-than-clever POTUS. Ultimately, time will not be kind to JD Vance, but we have to live through his Josh Taylor Era first.

In Anniversary, the rise of the authoritarian, anti-democratic government brought about by Elizabeth’s book and bolstered by The Cumberland Company’s technology is presented as linear and systemic. The events of the movie are measured in year-long increments. The escalations in political violence feel rote. Maybe that’s because at this point I’ve become inured to dystopian fiction about the rise of fascism. But I wonder if it felt that way in the fictional world Anniversary took place in, or if it felt like the constant and chaotic bombardment of degradation the way it feels in the U.S. right now. The parallels between the movie and real life are very strong. The fiction feels so civilized because we’re watching events happen from behind the windows of a large suburban home with a manicured lawn. In real life, most of us are struggling to pay for rent or groceries. And we’re watching people being abducted off of public streets on our televisions, or from the front line of protests.

Anniversary is still not a great movie, and it won’t make you feel any better about the current political situation here in America. But it’s worth the watch to see Diane Lane go full berserker mode. It’s also worth noting that Lionsgate produced this movie, distributed it for a three-week wide release, and then made it virtually disappear. Kind of like how Amazon MGM backtracked on releasing Luca Guadagnino’s movie about Sam Altman and OpenAI. The art that they don’t want you to see is absolutely the art you should be seeking out.

Anniversary is now streaming on Hulu.