This is one of two films about Anna Nicole Smith set to come out within a year of each other. It's a twin film. Anna Nicole Smith was a model for Playboy magazine in the early 90's. She did modeling for other magazines and clothing brands. She had roles in a couple, Hollywood productions. She even had her own reality TV show in the early 2000's. She was also involved in a legal battle that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, Marshall v. Marshall (2006). She was also the subject in a second, Supreme Court case, but that case was decided after Smith had died. She had famously died in February, 2007, at age 39. Like the second, Supreme Court case, this film also concerns a legal battle that involved Anna Nicole Smith, but took place after she died.
Kal Penn (Designated Survivor and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) stars as Sandeep Kapoor, a physician who owns his medical practice in Los Angeles. He bought the practice in 2004 from another doctor who had Anna Nicole Smith already as a patient. When Smith died of a drug overdose in Florida, it was discovered that Kapoor was the one who prescribed her the drugs. An investigation occurred and a series of circumstances led the prosecutors to arrest Kapoor and charge him with being involved or responsible for Smith's death. This film follows Sandeep's life from 2004 to 2010. 2010 was when the trial took place, and this film explores the circumstances that put him in the middle of this high-profile case and what happened to him in and out of court. It's a legal comedy in the vein of My Cousin Vinny (1992) or Legally Blonde (2001).
Linda Hamilton (Stranger Things and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) co-stars as Ellyn Garofalo, the attorney representing Sandeep. She is a very sharp and no-nonsense woman who gets to the point and doesn't joke around, which is kind of the joke of her character. She contrasts to Sandeep who is very nervous and bumbles through this legal process, often not doing himself any favors. However, at points, she recognizes a lot of the ridiculousness that is surrounding this case, mainly because Anna Nicole Smith lived a very ridiculous or over-the-top life.
Sandeep spends the majority of this film narrating the events with either voice-over or direct-to-camera addresses where he'll break the fourth wall. Ellyn tells a tale though that's akin to one of Sandeep's narrations where she explains one of the funniest and most ridiculous tangents in the Anna Nicole Smith story. She tells the tale of Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. It's one of the few times Ellyn steps out of her seriousness to dish with Sandeep over the fodder that was Smith's life.
Obviously, the Anna Nicole Smith stuff is what's sensational and the celebrity circus is probably what got this film financed, but, at the center of this feature is the story of a gay Indian-American man who is closeted from his father, as he experiences fatherhood himself. Roshan Sethi's A Nice Indian Boy (2025) is the only film that's comparable to the kind of representation and diversity here. Sethi's film has his protagonist's parents already know about their son's sexuality. Here, that's not the case. Sandeep's parents don't know and he's essentially outed to them on TV. Sandeep has a couple of scenes with his father Devinder Kapoor, played by Dhirendra (Under the Bridge and A Nice Indian Boy), which get at the heart of what's really moving about this film, the love between a father and son.
Rated R for language, some sexual material, and brief drug use.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 51 mins.
In theaters.
