The hallowed performer and auteur of acting, Daniel Day-Lewis, is a man who perpetually has his out of office on, though in the background he’s probably perusing his inbox, and occasionally deigns to reply out of sheer politeness. Yet his first screen outing since 2017’s Phantom Thread is strictly a family affair, with his son Ronan on directing detail, and a film based on a screenplay that the pair penned in tandem.
It’s fascinating and perhaps a little telling that a father and son would collaborate on a story such as Anemone, a relentlessly dour study of patriarchal absence, generational resentment and a sombre celebration of that innate craving that we sometimes have to just up sticks and leave in search of cloistered loneliness. It’s hard to read the film as an outburst of festering acrimony between father and son, as the pair seem fairly well-adjusted, though it’s a work very much in the traditions of the British “Angry Young Man” dramas of the 1960s, in which earthy blokes struggle to find their place in the world.
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Here, Day-Lewis Snr plays ex-soldier Ray, sporting an intimidating handle-bar moustache and the actor’s trademark thousand-yard stare. He lives in solitude in a tumbledown cabin, and is visited one day by his religious older brother Jem (Sean Bean) who was also in the armed forces and has been given Ray’s location for an emergency. It takes a good 45 minutes before the pair are able to strike up a conversation, and we wait to find out what it is that has cultivated such tension. Eventually, a bottle of scotch is cracked open, words finally flow and the context for Ray’s self-imposed isolation is slowly revealed.
Ronan Day-Lewis opts for a highly stylised visual approach which grates up against the emotional immediacy of the material, and while the prettified scenes of shimmering fields or light dancing over a flower petal are all very nice, they don’t really add much to the general atmosphere of malaise and torment. Some of these stylistic flourishes eventually play like overwrought padding, displacing the viewer from the essential intimacy of the story in search of some grander, more universal backdrop.
Conversely, where the film shines brightest are two simply-filmed passages where Day-Lewis Snr is given the spotlight to deliver two intricate monologues where it’s all but impossible to not hang off of his every snarled syllable. These really are the Maestro At Work moments in the film, not only showcasing the father’s ability to transform dialogue into something wholly expressive and dramatic, but from a writer’s perspective, the pair’s way with anecdote and authentic voice.
It’s a shame that so much else in the film feels either misguided or flat, not least a final act lapse into stodgy magical realism which removes us completely from the flinty naturalism the film has leveraged up to that point. Bean and Samantha Morton (who plays Ray’s spurned lover and mother of his estranged child, Nessa) fight against the tide in supporting roles. While Ray gets all the juicy dialogue and the lion share of the dramatic focus, Jem and Nessa get scarce little back story or any real character development of their own; everything they say or do is at the service of fleshing out Ray’s backstory.
Bean does his best in a role which largely amounts to watching Day-Lewis act, while Morton just looks constantly harrowed and glum, as if we’re to believe that her life has been in a 20-year stasis since her beau’s sudden departure. After a strong opening drag, there’s the feeling that the film doesn’t really have anything more to say, its revelations seeming fairly paltry in the scheme of things.