Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ronan Day-Lewis
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green
Despite having announced his retirement following 2017's Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis is back on our screens. The totemic actor has been drawn out of self-imposed retirement by his son, first-time writer/director Ronan Day-Lewis. In a case of art mirroring reality, or perhaps vice versa, Daniel's return to the screen sees him play a man drawn back to the world by his own son in a film he co-wrote with Ronan.
Early publicity materials suggested Anemone is set in the 1980s, but small details like the size of a character's cellphone place it firmly in the latter half of the '90s or even early 2000s. There we find Daniel's Ray Stoker, a recluse who lives in a cottage in the woods of the sort that might receive a visit from lost children seeking refuge from a witch. Instead, Ray receives a visit from his estranged brother Jem (Sean Bean). Two decades earlier Ray walked out on his pregnant girlfriend Nessa (Samantha Morton). In the intervening years Jem has married Nessa and raised Ray's son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) as his own. Brian has gotten himself into some trouble, signified by glimpses of the boy's bloodied knuckles, and Jem hopes he can convince Ray to return home to have a word with the son he has never met.
Much of Anemone plays like a variation on the first half of Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, but where Ben Kingsley was the lunatic trying to persuade the calm Ray Winstone to return to his old life, here that dynamic is reversed. A devout Christian, Jem is a quiet man, and Ray spends most of the movie aggressively needling him, often by mocking his religion. One of the movie's highlights sees Ray unspool an anecdote so filthy you expect it to end with "The Aristocrats."
Ray's hostility is gradually revealed as a not so subtle defence mechanism. This is a deeply troubled man, struggling to live with the memory of an act he committed while serving as a soldier in Northern Ireland. Jem's patience and willingness to be used as a figurative and eventually literal punchbag suggests he understands his brother's pain. He just doesn't know how to save him, or if he's even worth saving.
Ronan opens his film with a rehash of a famous Tarkovsky shot, an early warning of the film school shtick set to unfold over the next two hours. Most directors who land Daniel Day-Lewis recognise such a gift and focus their attention on that actor's ever-changing face. But I guess if Daniel Day-Lewis is your old man his face might not hold the same appeal. Ronan peppers his film with distracting moments of bizarre surrealism, like a giant silvery fish floating down a river, a dream involving a translucent half-man-half-giraffe creature (???) and a late storm with baseball-size hailstones. When the movie isn't settling into another monologue it often resembles a '90s music video of the sort made by indie bands with too much money. The Mogwai-esque score by Bobby Krlic does a lot of heavy lifting, its dirgy refrains constantly reminding us that we're supposed to take all of this very, very seriously.
The film suffers from awkward blocking and staging, and Ronan often doesn't seem to know what to do with Bean during his dad's lengthy monologues. A late monologue on a beach is staged in exactly the same manner as one Daniel earlier delivered in There Will be Blood.
Look past its film school naivete and there's an interesting narrative about two brothers forced to reunite when life has sent them down such disparate paths that they barely recognise each other. When the film doesn't go off on its music video tangents and fixes its gaze on Daniel's face, it's a reminder of what we've been missing for the last eight years. Resembling a nightmarish mix of U2's The Edge and soccer hardman Graeme Souness, Daniel's Ray is an intimidating presence, the sort of man you make sure to apologise to if you accidentally knock into him down the pub. Over two hours we watch as he slowly lowers the guard he's built up over a tortured life, and by the end we recognise him as a scared old man who experienced things as a child and young man that will haunt him forever. With some judicious editing, Anemone might be refashioned into a less showy film that understands its greatest asset is the face of its iconic leading man.
Anemone is in UK/ROI cinemas from November 7th.
