Daniel Day-Lewis (“Lincoln”) announced his retirement from acting eight years ago. The actor, one of the most accomplished in the history of the art form, had been a mercurial presence. Day-Lewis famously shied away from the press and chose his roles sparingly, acting in only eight roles from 1996-2017. The talk surrounding his acting techniques further contributed to his mystique, with Day-Lewis exemplifying a true method actor. Stories of Day-Lewis’ borderline deranged commitment to the form became the stuff of legend: speaking only in Abraham Lincoln’s old-timey American throughout the filming of “Lincoln,” surviving solely off of food he hunted himself while filming “The Last of the Mohicans” or staying in a wheelchair for the entirety of “My Left Foot.” Day-Lewis frequently describes his process of acting as being physically and mentally draining, making it easy to see why he decided to hang it up.
For years, it seemed like Day-Lewis was committed to his retirement. Maybe he just wanted to go back to cobbling with a master Italian shoemaker. Many of the filmmakers he collaborated with frequently made films without him and he wasn’t heard from publicly during this period. This made it quite a shock when a year ago, it was announced that Day-Lewis was returning to acting, starring in a film he co-wrote with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis (debut). In “Anemone,” Day-Lewis returns to the big screen portraying a character almost as impenetrable as himself, all while his son learns the ropes in his directorial debut.
“Anemone” follows Day-Lewis as Ray Stoker, an English veteran of The Troubles who lives in self-imposed exile far in the woods after suffering a traumatic event decades ago. It’s hard not to make parallels here to Day-Lewis himself, but Ray’s exile is as much physical as it is emotional, separated from any semblance of human contact. His brother Jem (Sean Bean, “Game of Thrones”) interrupts Ray’s solitude by bringing a letter from Ray’s ex-wife, Nessa (Samantha Morton, “The Whale”). Nessa’s letter contains troubling news about her and Ray’s son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley, “California Schemin”), whom Jem now raises in Ray’s absence. The brotherly dynamic between Jem and Ray frames much of the movie, as the volatile Ray oscillates from hostile to welcoming. The two brothers reunite, and while they’re wandering and hunting through the countryside, Jem desperately urges Ray to read the letter and return home. Meanwhile, the film is interspersed with scenes of Nessa struggling to connect with the emotionally troubled Brian.
The audience finds themselves in the dark at the beginning of “Anemone,” with very little information about these characters. Answers to the film’s key questions — why has Ray abandoned his wife and son? What happened to Brian to require Ray’s immediate return? — are fed slowly through dialogue and subtle moments of implied meaning. In this way, “Anemone” starts as a melodrama by way of its mystery — however, its plot threads lead to the core of its capricious protagonist rather than to the identity of a whodunnit murderer.
While this structure would imply a film that is character-driven and meditative in pace and tone, Ronan’s formal directorial choices undercut any emotional heft it tries to establish. The pacing of the film is wildly disjointed, cutting from thoughtful moments of dialogue between the brothers to bizarre montage sequences often set to angsty needle drops. The result of Ronan’s stylistic choice is a sense of endless momentum, a far cry from the slow burn that the film teases initially. “Anemone” is otherwise realist in its sentiments, attempting to highlight the emotional damage these people have suffered through realistic dialogue and rough-around-the-edges performances. However, with moments of discordant tone such as these distracting, fast-paced montages, the film departs from its realist roots and struggles to establish an identity. These moments of maximalist filmmaking suffocate the characters beneath their weight, making it difficult for audiences to connect to them.
That’s not to say that Ronan’s direction doesn’t have its strong moments. The young filmmaker has a past as a painter and visual artist, and is able to demonstrate his director’s eye with his framing of the countryside. Ray’s derelict cabin in the woods is far from a bucolic paradise, and Ronan appropriately shoots the film’s setting to reflect that. Scenes are framed in wide shots that emphasize the vast isolation Ray experiences from polite society. This is paired with overhead shots or sweeping camera movements across the rural expanse to create a sense of crushing separation.
“Anemone” also has its moments of surrealism where Ronan attempts to show off his filmmaking tricks. This includes several dream scenes in which the line between reality and symbolism is blurred (including ghosts and creatures of Celtic folklore), culminating in an ending sequence reminiscent of the memorable ending to “Magnolia,” as several characters experience a near-apocalyptic ice storm. While the surreal sequences are often striking on a visual level, they leave something to be desired emotionally. These images come and go with little elaboration, either explicitly or through the reactions of characters. In contrast to the rest of the movie’s style, they come off as jarring rather than the dreamlike, climactic moment they were seemingly intended to be.
Considering so much of the film is light on plot and heavy on character, the cores of the film are the performances turned in by Day-Lewis and Bean. Unsurprisingly, when these two actors are given room to provide color to their characters, the film is at its best. Day-Lewis, in particular, brings a unique physicality to Ray as a crotchety old man who has been removed from society far too long to care about appearance. Bean’s Jem, on the other hand, is a much more initially sympathetic character. Bean carries his performance with a deep grief, hoping to see his brother return to his son. The film finds life during these quieter moments between the two men, the words unspoken carrying more weight than their dialogue ever could.
However, even the best actors aren’t able to salvage every script. “Anemone” appears, at first, to be an endless crescendo, building to moments that seem to be emotional climaxes — yet many of these simply result in another scene of light dialogue and gallivanting around the countryside. When these stretches of build-up finally reach their peaks, they inevitably take the same form: the monologue. The answers to the film’s questions are all presented in this form, like when revealing the event that prompted Ray’s exile. This takes what may have started as a compelling mystery of character and turns it into something that Ronan simply tells us. These monologues, while delivered compellingly, feel stiff, as if too much information was delivered too directly and too quickly. They are lines that a screenwriter thinks a person should say, not something that a person would say. It seems that Ronan having the presence of his father is a crutch, not a gift. How can you have the best actor of a generation and not give him the showy, ostentatious role he has played so often? But for “Anemone,” a movie that was at its best when it let us linger uncomfortably with these characters, Day-Lewis’ monologues remove the viewer from the film. The effect turns what are supposed to be hard-hitting emotional climaxes into duds, relying too strongly on the presence of a great actor.
“Anemone” will always be a film defined by the presence of Daniel Day-Lewis. Across promotional materials, every review and even the screen time of the film itself, the actor is a domineering topic around it. While he is often compelling to watch for the film’s quality, his presence may harm it more than it helps. “Anemone” shows some promise, but at the end of the day, it falls flat.
Daily Arts Writer Will Cooper can be reached at wcoop@umich.edu.
