Daniel Day-Lewis returns for son’s film ‘Anemone’. It doesn’t deserve him.
Because we should always support our grown children in everything they do, it is good that Daniel Day-Lewis has come out of early retirement to act, co-write and be directed in a movie by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. And because the world’s moviegoers have sorely missed the father in the eight years since “Phantom Thread” - Day-Lewis père’s previous film and, as he said in 2017, his last - it is good that the son has coaxed him back to the screen. As a family reunion, “Anemone” is admirable.
As a movie, it’s deadly.
Paced at a lugubrious crawl, “Anemone” is the story of Ray Stoker (Daniel Day-Lewis), formerly a Unionist soldier for the British army during the Troubles and now a grizzled recluse living deep in the woods somewhere in the north of England. His brother Jem (a doughty Sean Bean) arrives for a visit in the movie’s opening scenes, pushing his way through thickets of forest and guided only by a set of coordinates Ray left behind in case of emergency.
It’s an emergency. Ray’s son Brian (Samuel Bottomley), having gone AWOL from the army and beaten another man nearly to death, is sitting disconsolate in his bedroom, raging sadly about the father he has never met, and his mother Nessa (Samantha Morton) - once Ray’s lover, now Jem’s wife - wants Ray to come home to have a chat with the boy. Jem, religious and obdurate, has been charged with bringing the old devil back to the hearth, but Ray’s not going that easily.
It’s a simple story with plenty of meat on its bones, so why is “Anemone” such a chore to watch? Plainly put, the movie is done in by portentous, heavy-handed direction, an insistence on greater meaning that, because it isn’t backed up by anything, squeezes the life out of the film. Great yawning silences fill the spaces between the actors’ lines, the score by Bobby Krlic is a thick blanket of industrial-strength shoegaze rock, and surreal touches like a giant salmon and some kind of phosphorescent deer only serve to confuse the issue. At a full two hours, the ponderousness becomes unbearable.
How’s Day-Lewis snr? Excellent, and it’s nice to have him back. His hair close-cropped and silvery, a vicious gleam in his eye, the star plays Ray as a hard case whose armour hides a thrice-betrayed man, twice in childhood and once by the British army, and who has given up on a society that has never given him a chance. Over the week or so that Jem stays with Ray in the woods, swimming in rivers and running along the beach while coaxing him to reemerge, Ray gives voice to his traumas in two riveting monologues (one of them merrily disgusting) plus a few choice asides about the brothers’ abusive Da (“We learned our violence from the No. 1 regional champion - and he had competition”). As well performed as those scenes are, they’re glib in terms of the character’s healing.
One of the strongest aspects of “Anemone” - the title refers to a flower that may or may not carry symbolic weight - is the cinematography by Ben Fordesman, which takes us into and above the forest’s lush, abstract chaos in ways that suggest the lead character’s seething brain. Even then, the film’s overreliance on drone shots becomes an empty gesture, promising emotional resonance but delivering only prettiness.
A climactic weather event does raise the movie’s pulse for a brief spell and signals Ray’s emotional breakthrough. In the end, though, it’s the dirgelike tempo that drives “Anemone” around the bend into the land of the unintentionally comic.
There’s an unofficial genre known as “slow cinema” that asks viewers to shift their moviegoing metabolism all the way down, the better to explore and appreciate the nuances of performance, filmmaking and life itself. This is not that. This is a young filmmaker who so wants to make every shot freighted with import that he ends up robbing his film of importance.
Be grateful that a great actor has come back in the name of the son. Otherwise, “Anemone” is a home movie that should have stayed home.