If an actor’s much-anticipated return after a nearly a decade in self-imposed retirement counts as a “cinematic event,” then three-time Academy Award winner Daniel Day-Lewis’ (Lincoln, There Will Be Blood, My Left Foot) above-the-title role in his director son Ronan’s feature-length debut, Anemone, undoubtedly qualifies.
Both paradoxically overlong and underdeveloped, Anemone unsurprisingly gives Day-Lewis an intense, brooding role worthy of his prodigious talents while failing to surround him or an incredibly talented cast, including Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, and relative newcomer Samuel Bottomley, the nuanced, layered story their characters — and by extension, the actors embodying those characters — fully deserve.
Anemone opens in enigmatic promise as Bean’s character, Jem Stoker, ominously prepares for a journey that will him take far away from his family. As he prays to his Christian god (Protestant edition), a tattoo inked on his back suggests a reckoning awaits, if not for Jem, then for his brother, Ray (Day-Lewis), a forest-dwelling recluse who left Jem, Nessa (Morton), Ray’s ex- and Jem’s current wife, and Brian (Bottomley), Ray’s biological son, behind decades earlier.
The mystery behind Ray’s sudden disappearance and Jem’s decision to find Ray and attempt to convince the latter to return to the city, initially unfolds in silence as Ray, a man of few words (at least at first), greets his long-lost brother with multiple grunts, a cup of tea, and when presented with a clicker used by hunters and hikers, smiles ruefully and simply says, “Our inheritance.’
Those two words alone suggest Anemone will concern itself with fathers and sons, personal and national traumas (the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and the British soldiers who served there), and self-healing and reconciliation (among other related matters), with Ray and Jem, their individual and collective histories as brothers, soldiers, and for both to varying degrees, fathers. The concept of legacy also plays a key role in how Anemone eventually resolves itself, one that takes on meta-textual urgency, given the father-son duo behind the film (Daniel Day-Lewis co-wrote the script with first-time director Ronan).
Even then, though, Anemone begins to lose that aura of mystery as it cuts back-and-forth between Ray and Jem in Ray’s isolated cabin, and Nessa and Brian somewhere in a nearby city, the latter facing the consequences of a violent outburst that could lead to to ostracism and possible imprisonment, the son following after his biological father.
Likely traceable to Ray’s abrupt disappearance and the immediate aftermath, Brian’s volatile behavior naturally raises the nature vs. nurture question, but it’s not a question Anemone wants to answer with any real specificity, insight, or depth. Instead, the story shifts back to Ray and Jem, their slowly unthawing relationship, and the revelation with a capital “R” that will explain Ray’s sudden disappearance and his decision to spend the remainder of his natural life in self-imposed exile, a kind of penance for a crime (or crimes) as much ethical and moral as they are — or might be — legal.
It’s precisely at that point that Anemone makes a major, if not quite fatal, misstep, a misstep suggesting a failure of nerve by Daniel and Ronan Day-Lewis as co-filmmakers. Presumably uncomfortable with the idea of Ray as a potentially irredeemable villain except in his own tortured mind, Anemone takes a wholly unsatisfying, unsatisfactory turn toward a murky, muddled revelation of Ray’s past, one that comes frustratingly close to not just excusing Ray’s actions, but also irreparably softening the impact of Ray’s confessional scene with Jem.
Where Anemone stumbles narratively and thematically, it shines twice as brightly visually. The Yale-trained Ronan Day-Lewis has already developed a keen eye for visual composition and fluid camera movements, as well as eliciting naturalistic, grounded performances from his cast. Bobby Krlic’s (Him, Eddington, Beau Is Afraid) heavily industrial score adds to the perpetual foreboding and potential doom hovering over the Stoker family.
Occasional surreal touches feel more like the efforts of a first-time filmmaker attempting to both find and assert a distinct voice, above and beyond his well-known father, than anything else.
Anemone opens Friday, October 3, only in movie theaters, via Focus Features.