Sean Baker: From Prince of Broadway to Anora in Vegas
It is disheartening to think that 10 years ago, give or take, rather than follow around an oligarch’s repulsive failson, his parasitic entourage, and the stripper he’s hired to roleplay as his girlfriend, Sean Baker would have stuck with the cleaning crew sweeping up the debris of New Year’s Eve bedlam littering the kid’s opulent mansion. (To clarify the record: it’s his parents’ mansion.) But that’s the brief Baker gave himself on Anora, his most recent film, his first Oscar-nominated film, and his first Oscar-winning film, a 2-hour plus Cinderella riff where the stripper, Anora Mikheeva (Mikey Madison), and the failson, Vanya Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), live unhappily ever after.
That Anora found its way to the Criterion Collection in a lush 4K presentation, richly packaged besides, two months after cleaning up at the 97th Academy Awards in the Best Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, and Film Editing categories, is the happiest of coincidences. But the label’s choice to pair the film’s addition to their library with Prince of Broadway, Baker’s third feature, is hard to accept as accidental. If it is Criterion’s mission to restore and distribute “important classic and contemporary films,” then Baker’s cinema is a shoo-in; the company brought Take Out, his sophomore effort, co-directed with Taiwanese actress, producer, and filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou, under its umbrella in 2022, after all. That other Baker films would follow suit was a matter of time.
But Take Out and Prince of Broadway are delegates from the early chapters of Baker’s career as a neorealist storyteller of working class and marginalized peoples’ struggles. He made the former in 2004, the latter in 2008, and stuck with his socially conscious aesthetic through the 2010s, closing the decade out with The Florida Project in 2017. Yes, Baker anchored that movie by casting Willem Dafoe in a supporting role, the highest profile actor he’d worked with to date; nonetheless, Dafoe’s magnitude and warmth reinforce, rather than undermine, Baker’s depiction of American life on the fringes. He is the connective tissue between Disney World’s shadow, which The Florida Project takes place under, and the primary characters, a 6-year-old girl and her single mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), hustling nonstop to forestall homelessness while staying in a budget motel.
Anora is absent a name like Dafoe’s, though even with the participation of a veteran talent like him, the film would likely read just as anomalously in the context of Baker’s creative sensibilities. If it was, in 2017, unusual to see a celebrated, established star like Dafoe in a movie directed by a director known for casting non-professional performers, the choice worked; he breathes gruff but gentle life into Bobby, the budget motel’s owner, ever beset upon by his job’s responsibilities, and inconvenienced daily by rowdy Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), for whom he holds deep affection regardless of the trouble she causes him.
Likewise, Mikey Madison fits Ani well, even if opportunities are missed for her to allow viewers a greater glimpse of her interior life. Ani seems to have her guard up at her most content. It makes a degree of sense that she cuts an elusive figure up to Anora’s final moment. (What the scene represents is likewise elusive; what motivates her to tears in the end is an open-ended question.) But Madison’s portrayal of Ani isn’t the wrench in Anora’s gears. In terms of mainstream recognition, she’s in the middle of the fame scale, courtesy of her appearances in movies like the Radio Silence Scream reboot, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and her work in Pamela Adlon’s superb FX series Better Things from 2016 to 2022; a lead with a higher profile could have played Ani, but not with the same blend of calculation and vulnerability. There’s a reason she won Best Actress when Oscar punditry had Demi Moore down as a lock.
What sets Anora wobbling on its axis is Baker’s partial abandonment of the tenets and tendencies integral to his evolution as a filmmaker over the last 20 years. This muddled dereliction of principle manifests not through the caliber of Baker’s cast, but by the relationship he establishes to his subject matter over the movie’s course. It’s true that sex workers layered Anora with praise for accuracy and attention to detail, and also true that critics exist within that demographic. But it’s worth suggesting that for a movie that is about a sex worker, and sex work, Anora more or less backgrounds Ani’s trade even before Vanya proposes to her in a last ditch attempt at avoiding a return trip to Russia to work for his father (Aleksei Serebryakov). Sex work is where the narrative commences. It isn’t the focal point.
Like Ani, Anora is seduced by Vanya’s world of extreme wealth and privilege. In theory, the film is “about” the ways that money empowers the people who have it with power–to get what they want when they want it, to pave their problems over, and, if paving doesn’t work, then to flee them entirely–and about the gulf that exists between the richest folks on the planet and those among the poorest. When Vanya’s parents make emergency plans to fly to the U.S. to intervene in his impulsive Vegas marriage to Ani, the little shit bugs out faster than a bullet, leaving Ani with Toros (Baker regular Karren Karagulian), the family’s handler and Vanya’s godfather, and his brute squad, comprising his brother Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), and Igor (Yura Borisov), a gopnik with a heart of gold; the quartet spend the night searching New York City for their fugitive prince, wrecking up a Coney Island candy store, destroying a tow truck in the middle of hauling off Toros’ illegally parked SUV, and causing a ruckus at Ani’s old workplace along the way.
One could point at these moments, and at the New Year’s Day disaster zone in the Zakharov household, as buttressing support for Baker’s thesis: that upper-upper-upper class people go about their lives without sparing a single thought for the humanity of the poor unfortunates belonging to the the under class, which constitutes pretty much everybody who isn’t them. But Baker used to make movies about those unfortunates, the common man, society’s most vulnerable, from sex workers to migrants; Anora is not that movie. Anora happens to those characters, from the tow truck driver to the cleaners. But it isn’t about them. As Ani, Toros, Garnik, and Igor are to Vanya, specks in his rearview, so too are the people whose stories Baker used to invest himself in.
Imagine Prince of Broadway if Lucky (Prince Adu), a smooth-talking New York City street vendor, who has parenthood thrust upon him by an ex claiming that her toddler son, Prince (Aiden Noesi), is his, could afford proper care for a child. Imagine what kind of person he’d turn out to be if he had the funds to either do right by the boy or to outsource, or otherwise shirk, his responsibilities. Prince of Broadway makes a striking contrast to Anora as a film where poverty is identified as the theft of choice; Baker pays the distinction no mind while chronicling Ani’s rise and fall, because he doesn’t need to. Like Vanya, he benefits from wealth as both an emergency key box and safety cushion, buffering him from hardships endured by side characters he bypasses in his zeal to fashion his saga of American class disparity into a randy screwball comedy, stitched to a rags to riches saga that ends up back in the rags.
The effect of Anora gives the impression of another person’s idea of a Sean Baker film, glossier and comparatively commercial. But it doesn’t jibe with the films he made prior to the turn of the decade, either, rooted as they are in spheres of reality Anora staunchly avoids. As such, its appearance in the Criterion Collection makes Prince of Broadway’s tandem inclusion feel downright necessary: a reminder of where Sean Baker comes from, coupled with the boldest demarcation of where he is today.
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.