When Daniel Day-Lewis announced his return to acting for the first time since Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, the industry reacted with cautious excitement. Not that anyone in their right mind feared his otherworldly skill had atrophied in his absence. Rather, it was the impetus. It’s impossible to fault him for coming out of retirement to co-star in his son’s debut feature, but it’s also reasonable to assume his involvement says nothing about the project’s quality. Although he shares a writing credit with Ronan, it’s the first of either’s career, so we’ve no idea if his preternatural skill at performance translates to the page. As such, Anemone was full of conflict before a single frame was shot.
That’s fitting, as Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a man fraying at the seams, a tightly wound ball of regret who first appears fiercely put together, but whom we watch unravel over the film’s two hour runtime. What we know about him and his past is doled out in mysterious morsels as he spends time with his estranged brother Jem (Sean Bean). Jem only found his secluded hut in the middle of a dense forest by consulting a scrap of paper with precise coordinates, speaking to Ray’s deep desire to be forgotten and Jem’s desperation for assistance. Once reunited, they have little to say to each other, with the first words out of Ray’s mouth (an acidic “Fuck off”) coming twenty minutes into the film, after the men have spent the better part of a day together. It’s only through Jem’s persistent presence that Ray begins to open up in his own way, beginning by wielding the poison in their shared past as a cudgel.
Despite all the steadfast patience demonstrated by the freshman director, the dialog often resorts to blunt revelation to move the plot forward and give insight into the character. Although it takes quite a while for The Troubles to get a mention, Day-Lewis pans across a child’s depiction of its key events in crayon to open the movie, screaming its centrality at us. As such, we know it’s going to have something to do with Brian (Samuel Bottomly) being distraught over nearly killing someone in a street brawl. So it’s unsurprising when the men discuss their time fighting against the IRA twenty years before, explicitly calling out how much of a lost bastard Ray was. A bunch of signposts arise to ensure we’ve figured out that Jem stepped in as Brian’s father upon Ray’s self-imposed exile, and that fathers can be absent in various ways, all of them engendering bitterness. Most character details initially left for the audience to infer are later spelled out explicitly, lessening their power.
Of course, the film’s main draw is the opportunity to see DDL work his magic once again. And boy does he! His son is smart enough to withhold his visage for a short while, teasing us with a man whose face goes unseen at first. Once shown, though, the camera is never off him for too long. The magnetism he exudes is undeniable, even when being a prick. He perfectly embodies a standoffish, callous, bitter man, full of regret but raised in a time when the only accepted outlet was child abuse. As such, the narrative and the elder Day-Lewis’ performance are simpatico, as Ray’s willingness to open up to Jem mirrors his gradual acclamation to modernity and desire to return to society. All of it comes to a head in a powerful and moving monologue in which cinematographer Ben Fordesman holds on his face in a close-up as he works his magic, interrupted only by a few unnecessary cutaways to Jem’s stoic stare.
For as steady and deliberate the pacing is, the editing is shakier. Whether that’s due to lack of coverage or takes or confidence holding the audience’s attention is impossible to know from the text alone. What’s certain is that it calls attention to itself on a handful of occasions, pulling you out of the scene for a moment before you settle back in, harming the intensity of the drama in a film that leans hard into its tone. This is paired with a few surreal visuals to hammer home how haunted Ray is, despite the actor’s portrayal already conveying that a dozen different ways. They are gorgeous, especially as they’re always accompanied by Bobby Krlic’s fantastic, droning score consisting mostly of post-rock, a genre made to express deep wells of sadness and self-reflection and pain dotted with the beauty of the world. But they reveal the younger Day-Lewis’ background in non-narrative forms of visual art.
This lack of grasp over how to craft an engaging plot is seen even more clearly in the frequent check ups on Brian’s story. It’s hard to turn down a chance to cast the brilliant Samantha Morton as a woman whose past has left her a shell of her former self, none of which is communicated in the dialog, because it doesn’t need to be. But witnessing her attempts to explain to Brian who his father really was, even defending his abandonment of their family, fails to deepen our emotional connection. Instead, it feels like its sole purpose is to break up our time with the brothers, again implying Ronan is in need of more confidence to tell the stories he wishes to tell. At least those scenes make sense. Hattie (Safia Oakley-Green) is introduced late, shows up in a scene or two without saying or doing much of anything, and has no obvious tie to the characters or themes. Her final appearance sees her silently staring at the baseball sized hail savaging the town, mouth slightly agape, bringing us no closer to understanding her role.
All of this pains me to say, as Day-Lewis ends the movie at a perfect moment. As the scene in question began, the narrative focus of the prior one hundred and twenty minutes had drawn to a close, so there was no need to keep going. And yet, so often, filmmakers of all sizes and levels of experience cannot help themselves, compelled to put a tidy bow on their story. Most of the time, they gently guide the audience down from the emotional peak of the experience, greatly lessening its impact. But for all his flaws and immaturity as a director, Day-Lewis nails it. That scene rises to a crescendo, the score building throughout, no words being uttered but so much being communicated. Then…
Cut to black.
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