Eight years after vanishing from the silver-screen spotlight, Daniel Day-Lewis returns to play, fittingly, a recluse with little interest in the attention of others in Anemone.
Premiering at the New York Film Festival ahead of its Oct. 3 theatrical release, the directorial debut of the headliner’s son Ronan is a bracing reminder that few actors are as commandingly intense, providing him with a roiled, highly charged role—wrought with anger, sorrow, guilt, resentment, and shame—into which he can heartily bite.
Though its daring gestures don’t always pay off, it’s a tale of internal and external brutality, of fathers, sons and clans scarred by violence, that serves as a sturdy showcase for its exceptional star.
Day-Lewis’ camera emerges out of a bush to catch its first glimpse of Ray Stoker (Day-Lewis) as he chops wood at the remote cabin—its walls made of aged stone, its roof a sheet of corrugated metal—that he calls home. Anemone avoids depicting its protagonist’s face as he moves about this abode and, simultaneously, Jem (Sean Bean) travels from his Northern England suburb into the vast countryside, guided by a single slip of paper that contains geographic coordinates. Ray is an enigma, and the director’s decision to deny us his countenance creates a divide between the audience and character that echoes Ray’s willful detachment from civilization.
Ray isn’t just alienated from surrounding society; he’s also estranged from Nessa (Samantha Morton) and Brian (Samuel Bottomley), whom Jem leaves behind on his journey. The script (written by Ronan and Daniel) is a cagey beast that functions as a low-key mystery, and the first of numerous questions it raises concerns Brian, whose knuckles are bloody and face is anguished, and who appears to be in grave trouble over the incident that left him in this condition.
Nessa’s comments to Brian about Jem and Ray suggest that these individuals’ familial relationships aren’t what they superficially seem. Things become no clearer when Jem arrives at his destination, where Ray greets him with brusque displeasure and total silence, letting him sit on a chopping block at his table (since he only has one chair), giving him tea, and feeding him stew until, at lights out, he finally utters his initial words to the interloper: “F— off!”
(Warning: Some spoilers follow.)
Jem has come with a letter from Nessa, and Ray has no desire to read it—or, for that matter, to humor his guest, who turns out to be his brother. Relayed in voiceover by Morton, Nessa’s missive concerns Brian, about whom she’s terribly concerned, and who she believes would benefit from seeing Ray.
Anemone keeps things close to the vest for much of its opening half, content to reside in quiet spaces that are flush with fury. With closely cropped gray hair, a salt-and-pepper mustache, and eyes that appear to be on fire, Ray is a hermetic powder keg on the precipice of detonating, and Day-Lewis exudes a barely suppressed rage that borders on the mythic. Anemone amplifies that impression, its creeping zooms, aerial shots, and entrancing score of lush electric guitars and cascading synths imbuing the material with a gritty fairy tale grandeur.
Ray is something like a real-life ogre hiding out in an enchanted (or haunted) middle of nowhere, and his rapport with Jem is curt and bitter. In the first of two breathtaking monologues, Ray recounts his recent run-in with the priest who, decades earlier, molested him, and his spiteful glee at describing the defecation-centric way in which he delivered payback to the pedophile is as gripping as the suggestion that it’s all made up is tantalizing.
Day-Lewis’ ferocity is overwhelming, and it’s a testament to Bean that he holds his own in their many scenes together, Jem’s rugged and unyielding stoicism a barricade against Ray’s crashing ire, even as he pleads with the loner to read Nessa’s letter and comply with its wishes.
Anemone’s patient, manicured direction enhances its tightly wound energy and more than one of its signature sights—in particular, a shot that retreats from a cross-section of Ray’s house as the two men vehemently dance in slow-motion—have a storybook beauty.
At other times, though, Day-Lewis pushes things a tad too far into the fantastical, as with a late encounter between Ray and a creature that isn’t simply basking in the moonlight, but appears to be made of it. While ambiguity is a welcome component of the fledgling filmmaker’s maiden feature, it’s not always as assured as the actors’ performances, and a slight shakiness becomes more noticeable as the action drifts toward its climactic conflicts and resolutions.
As is eventually revealed, Ray is in self-inflicted exile for a scandal dating back to his military service, when he and Jem combatted the IRA’s terrorist threat, and Anemone draws delicate lines between the civil nature of the Troubles and Ray’s strained bond with his family—which includes Nessa, his wife, and Brian, his son, whom he abandoned on the eve of the boy’s birth.
The film suggests parallels between the personal and the political with impressive deftness. Near its end, however, its aesthetics become repetitive (when it comes to images, sounds, and tone), lending it a mannered quality that’s at odds with its emotional urgency.
If Day-Lewis the director shows tremendous promise but sporadically stumbles, Day-Lewis the actor makes no missteps as Ray, whose torment has sustained him for years in de facto solitary confinement, and whose wrath is a cloak designed to conceal the wellspring of doubt, regret, fear, and self-loathing lurking within.
For the three-time Oscar winner, it’s a tour-de-force of withdrawn misery and unvarnished antagonism, the latter directed at his sibling, his late father (whose beatings gave him his original taste of suffering), his rumor-mongering persecutors, and of course himself.
Day-Lewis is the undeniable centerpiece of this fuming study of a man, a domestic unit, and a country torn apart by war, his turn a model of carefully balanced restraint and explosiveness. Even if Anemone never quite operates on his unrivaled level, it’s an impressive homecoming—and a pleasure to have him back.
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