Some films are completely made by their last scenes, and "Anora" is one of them.
For the entire movie, we've watched Anora, a sex worker who falls into a whirlwind romance with the son of a Russian oligarch, convince the world and herself that she's tough as nails. She holds her own against the heavies who the oligarch sends to "contain" the situation, that situation being a Vegas marriage between his son and this American girl that he wants to force them to annul. She stands up to the son's god-awful mother and gives her a dressing down in a Vegas chapel. She even kicks the crap out of a work colleague, a fellow dancer at the strip club who delights in seeing Anora brought down a peg. And then, in the film's final moments, we see all of that bravura fall away and Anora turn into a sobbing little girl when a character offers her a taste of genuine human kindness and affection. The moment took my breath away and turned me into a sobbing mess myself. It's the kind of ending that makes you want to go back immediately and watch the movie again to see how your impressions of everything leading up to that ending might change.
Sean Baker makes one small miracle of a movie after another. The man just cannot stumble as far as I'm concerned. Like all of his movies, "Anora" chooses to focus on a character who, let's be honest, many if not most of us would dismiss in real life as trashy and someone to distance ourselves from, and then he lets us spend time with them and see how our feelings about them change as they become less of a collection of obnoxious character traits and more of a fully fleshed out person with a complicated interior life. Mikey Madison gives an astonishing performance in the title role, and I hope this movie isn't too small and out of the mainstream to get her some serious awards attention at year's end.
Grade: A.
